Tag: food

A stick-to-your-ribs soup.

The first time I made this soup I peered at the finished product and said, “Ugh.  Doesn’t look too great.”  Then I actually ate it and changed my tune. It’s incredibly flavorful, packed with umani flavors.  Some of the ingredients are not ingredients I have on hand on a regular basis, like the seaweed, but I’ve made this several times and it’s just what the doctor ordered on a freezing cold morning.  
To make it yourself, follow the link to Eating Well’s Tofu and Vegetable Stew.

Kale Salad a la Casey.

This summer I had a great Kale Salad made by bride Casey for her wedding.  It was massaged kale and had quoina in it and was very, very good.

Upon receiving a bumper crop of kale from my colleague John, I put together this Kale salad inspired by her creation.

Here’s the recipe:

Bring 1.75 c. water to boil and add 1 c. quoina.  Turn heat to low and cook until done, approximately 20 minutes.

Clean and remove the stems from a whole lot of kale.  2-3 bunches from the store, or a huge bowl’s worth from your garden.

Put the cleaned and stemmed kale in a bowl and add 1 t salt.  Set a timer for five minutes and squeeze the kale in your hands.  Nothing will happen at first, but by the end of the five minutes, the kale will have nicely broken down.  Squeeze as much liquid as you can out of the kale and transfer your kale to a cutting board.

Clean out the bowl, discarding the salty kale juice, then finely chop the kale and return to the bowl.

Grate two carrots on top of the kale.

Cook 2-3 (or possibly 4?) rashers bacon, drain and cool.  The chop into small pieces and add to the bowl.

Put those on top of the kale and carrots.

When the quoina is done, add it to the bowl.

Mix up a curry vinaigrette.  In a separate bowl add 1/4 c. oil, 1/4 c white vinegar, 1 clove garlic, minced, 1 T packed light brown sugar, 1 T minced fresh chives, 1/2 t. curry powder and 1/2 t soy sauce. Mix until combined.

Pour over the salad in the bowl and toss everything to combine.  Good cold, also probably good warm.

Vintage Cakes. Texas Sheet Cake


Quite delicious and easy to make.
I encountered two difficulties.  One was that I had a 9 X 13 pan, but not a 10 X 15 pan.  My mom did, and I was all set to borrow it, but then left it at her house, and thus, ended up using the 9 X 13.  That didn’t seem to make a ton of difference.

My second problem was that the directions didn’t explicitly say to leave the cake in the pan and so I tried to remove it.  That was a bad idea and ended with me dropping the cake, causing part of it to shift, as you can see in the picture.  I wrote myself a note to leave the cake in the pan for next time.  You make the cake, make the frosting, pull the cake out of the oven, pour on the frosting and then let the whole thing cool.

Overall, very good cake and I’m excited to try the variation with cinnamon and coffee.

Boise Farmers Market

There were no farmers markets in Boise upon my last living there.  So I wandered down to check out the one near my hotel.

These girls were selling play-doh which I found kind of genius.  It also made me wonder just how much it costs to rent a stall at this Farmer’s Market.
 

Coffee and pastries were selling well.
 
This guy’s business was called “North End Lavender.”  If only I liked lavender, I would have bought some.

My impression was that there were a lot more vendors of meat than the farmers markets I come across in Portland.  Also, I bought some cheese curds that were flavored.  They had many choices, but the one I went with was tomato basil.  I found flavored cheese curds to be a very good food product idea.

I also bought some cherries for friends I was visiting and delicious raspberries.  So good!

Vintage Cakes’ Cherry Chip Cake. Also Chocolate Ice Cream.

I’ve been busy this weekend making ice cream.
 
And a beautiful Cherry Chip Cake to celebrate the end of school.

It’s Cherry Chip cake with a thin spread of ganache between layers and then frosted with a cherry buttercream frosting.

The cookbook author developed it because she missed the Cherry Chip cake mixes from her childhood.  I too enjoyed those and was happy to try this cake.  I assumed that the Cherry Cake mixes were no more, however when buying ingredients at New Seasons, the cashier told me that the Cherry Chip mix is still made and that New Seasons carries it.  It was rather deflating news.  I still made the cake from scratch anyway.

Sometimes, you just need a good grilled cheese.


All week long I’ve been craving grilled cheese.  Thanks to my sourdough starter, I keep myself in homemade whole-wheat sourdough bread, which is good for many things, but not the grilled cheese I was thinking of.  So I made a some perfect sandwich bread, bought some delicious ham, sliced up some Tillamook medium cheddar and made a pot of tomato soup to boot.

It really hit the spot.

Two headlines from today’s paper

Reading this, I audibly gasped, mostly because I’ve been waiting for years for male athletes to start coming out of the closet.  Also: same last name!
 
Oh Grant Butler.  A few years ago you decided to experiment with being vegan for a few months and I thought, “I hope you can make it that long without cheese” because cheese is the number one reason I don’t want to be a vegan.  The number two reason is that I don’t think it’s actually a healthy way of eating.  But you, Grant Butler, took to it like a duck to water and now your write columns that amuse me such as this:

Now I don’t mind a good veggie burger now and then, but really, the bun?  The bun is the best part, in fact,  the main reason for eating the veggie burger.  When you get right down to it, I would eat the bun with a bit of butter rather than the veggie burger wrapped in lettuce or what have you.

I make a pizza.

Matt is out of town and I have the day off, so I will make pizza for dinner.  It’s also the end of the month which means there isn’t much left in the grocery account, so I’m going to make a pizza with what I have.  I picked some asparagus from the garden and sliced that up and sprinkled it on. Then I opened a can of sardines and added them.  There were Lima beans that needed to be used up, so on those went.   I had some leftover shredded mozzarella, which was good.  Then, after I baked all of that, I cracked four eggs on top.

This was a very fine pizza.