Happy New Year
Well, December was a busy month for Charity and I, what with the holidays, finals, and the like, but I think we're back! Today I stumbled upon a really interesting website, named, aptly enough, Stumble Upon. I found a really interesting site that immediately made me think of Charity, right off.
http://www.tastespotting.com/ is described as...
Founded in January 2007 on the idea that we eat first with our eyes, TasteSpotting is our obsessive, compulsive collection of eye-catching images that link to something deliciously interesting on the other side. Think of TasteSpotting as a highly visual potluck of recipes, references, experiences, stories, articles, products, and anything else that inspires exquisite taste.
We don’t use the term “potluck” for the hell of it. Everyone brings something to the party here: the user community submits images/links from around the web and the editorial team reviews the submissions. What finally gets served up on the site is a beautifully refined set of the community’s contributions.
...and is a collection of frankly beautiful images of food that I would love to cook. The recipes are pretty well done, but it's the photographs that are inspiring. I can't gush about this site enough--and I'm not even the cook of the duo!
Recipe: Stuffed Steak
I meant to post this on Saturday, but my upgrade to Windows 7 didn't go quite as planned and I ended up spending the weekend involuntarily offline. However, I still want to share the easy and (relatively) quick recipe that I made for my friends on Friday night. There are a fair amount of ingredients, but it's really tasty.
You need a crock pot, a stove, and a pan (preferably 2). There are three primary elements to the meal. The onion-and-tomato topping, the steak itself, and the pepper stuffing.
The steak should be thin-cut raw sandwich steak, or thin-cut pieces of beef intended to be quickly cooked on the stove. This kind of cut is usually relatively tough, so it needs to be marinaded. A simple marinade of steak sauce and lemon juice for a few hours should be sufficient, but it depends on the quality of the meat you purchase.
- steak sauce
- 2 standard-size packs of thin-cut sandwich steak
- lemon juice
Put the steak into a gallon plastic bag, dump in enough steak sauce and lemon juice to coat the steak. Zip and fold up the plastic bag around the steak, then refrigerate on a platter to prevent leakage.
Then make the topping.
Put 1 tub of margarine into a microwavable bowl. Add worchestershire sauce, hot sauce, lemon juice, paprika, old bay*. Melt in the microwave, stir. Taste, adjust ingredients to taste. Pour into warmed crock pot (on the hot setting).
- 2 baskets of cherry tomatoes.
- 2 onions
Quarter the onions into a petal shape, then peel apart. Place into crock pot. Stir. Cover.
Depending on your crock pot's settings, times may vary, but around the time your onions taste sweet and your tomatoes look wrinkled, it's time to prepare the stuffing.
* If you aren't from the Maryland area, this may be difficult to come by. However, you can google a recipe to make old bay yourself with relative ease. It's just a spice mixture popular in the region.
- 1 sandwich baggie full of cut bell peppers*
- 1 carrot
- 1 cucumber
* My family is friends with farmers, so we have a lot of bell peppers and tend to slice them, then freeze bags with mixes of the three main colors mixed in. I used 1 sandwich bag worth, which was probably about a pepper and a half.
Cut the vegetables. Use a julienne cut--slices should resemble match-sticks and be about 1/4" wide and about 3" long (I cut the cucumber and carrot in half, to be about the size of my bell pepper slices).
Warm a skillet or pan on your stove, wiped down with olive oil to prevent sticking. Add your vegetables. Season with standard green herbs: oregano, basil, parsley. Also add paprika. Stir and flip until vegetable juices begin to accumulate in the bottom of the pan.
Remove the steaks from the fridge and cook on the stove in another oiled pan (I used a griddle because they're bigger and it's a lot of steak in terms of surface area).
Take a finished steak and place on a plate. Using tongs (or normal utensils, but the tongs make it much easier), place julienned vegetables in the center of the steak, crossing the thinner section of the steak. Wrap the steak around the vegetables and secure with toothpicks (I recommend using two). Repeat until plate is full or you're out of steak. Then spoon the onion/tomato mixture from the crock pot on top of the vegetables and serve with a knife and fork.
This was enough to feed three people, but they also work as hors d'œuvres though they aren't bite-sized. Perhaps tapas would be the better term?
Lunch at Work: Bento Boxes and Meals
When I started working an honest-to-goodness full time job, I bought lunch - a lot. I ate at the on-site dining room or went out to nearby delis and restaurants for a bite to eat. Eventually, however, that wore off. I couldn't afford, and didn't want to spend, $30+ per week on lunch-time meals. So I began bringing lunch - turning to leftovers and pre-packaged meals from the grocery store. None of these options factored in calories - and I liked less and less what my scale reported back.
Then an article in the New York Times covered a method that has been catching on recently: the bento box. I won't get into the history of bento, but one of the interesting ideas behind bento boxes is that if you fill your box with normal food (for example, not with chocolate fudge), the size of the bento equals roughly how many calories you are eating. It's an interesting way to control caloric intake.
Another thing that a bento does well is food separation. Why carry three tupperware containers of various sizes because you don't want to mix strawberries with chicken teriyaki? A bento box with dividers will keep your food separated, either in different sections on the same "level", or in a different tier if you have a multi-tier bento box.
Personally, I use a two-tier bento box that fits approximately 580ml of food, or just shy of 2.5 cups worth of food. So, my meal each day is about 580 calories.
What do I put into a bento? I generally go for laziness over creativity - I make a little extra for dinner the night before, pack the bento and let it cool on the countertop, then refrigerate it overnight. I try, however, to pack foods that will do well in a bento: small pieces of chicken, miniature burgers (I love Just Bento's meat and tofu recipe), small-cut vegetables, small fruits, etc. Liquid-based and very heavily sauced items can leak out if your box isn't water-tight; extra sauce can be kept in little bento sauce bottles.
Grilling, Sophisticated and Easy
As a general rule, I'm a terrible cook. Unlike Charity, it's not one of my talents. Although I'm capable of making decent-tasting food, usually I'm too bloody lazy to bother. Most times, if my food tastes good, I'm content. I don't insist on a lot of variety, either; 3lbs. of spaghetti or taco meat or catchatori will last me for a week and I'm content to eat it for three meals a day. I can't eat TV dinners, but I'm totally fine with pot pies, pre-made bbq ribs (they only take 10 minutes in the oven!), and other frozen foods that go into the oven.
Despite this, I love to grill. Most of my parties are outside, where my family has a big, elevated fireplace that we made out of cinderblocks and firebrick, a brick oven (made by us of the same material), a nice big cinderblock grill with two heights for the coal, and a smoker (which we didn't make, but it's still awesome). In my family, we take grilling seriously. Hotdogs and hamburgers are not allowed at my parties; I grew up on venison bites, made from deer shot by the next-door-neighbors who came to the pitfires my dad hosted (which were the center of the neighborhood). Nothing compares to the baked beans my mother makes on the grill, and the best apple pie I've ever had was made in the brick oven right beside it.
Now that I'm older, I host my own parties out on that patio. It's not the neighbors who come, but friends of mine (though neighbors are always welcome, we tend to stay out later than the retired folks who live where I grew up), and we don't cook my parents' food. We cook mine. There still aren't hotdogs, though, and I'm not the kind of person who cooks with a recipe; I cook by eye. On the grill, it's the only way to be sure.
I had never really cooked before I hosted my first party, but I had a friend who was vegetarian and I love(d) chicken, so we started from there and raided the garage cabinets for stuff to season with. Here's what we use:
Quick Meal: Peasant Chicken Pasta
It's 6:30. You've faced traffic or the subway to get home, and now it's time to make dinner for one. Resist the urge to order in, and cook up a quick meal, with leftovers that you can bring to work for lunch the next day, or freeze for a later dinner. This dish is healthy, flavorful, and can be cooked and on the table in twenty minutes. I call it "peasant" chicken pasta because it's good for emptying out the vegetable drawer and pasta boxes.
Ingredients
1 large chicken breast, cut into bite size pieces
1/3 lb short pasta, such as penne or farfalle
2 cups chopped vegetables of your choice - I like to use carrots, broccoli, red peppers and cauliflower or asparagus
4 large sundried tomato slices, julienned
1 shallot, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
2-3 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup prepared pesto sauce, or 5-6 Tbsp homemade pesto
A few pinches of salt for the pasta water
Salt and pepper to taste
Grated Parmesan or Grana Padano (optional)
Instructions
Heat a large pot of generously salted water, and add the pasta when boiling. Heat a nonstick frying pan on medium, and sautee the chopped shallots and garlic, then add the chicken and sautee until almost cooked through. Add the vegetables and sundried tomatoes; cook until tender. When the pasta is al dente, drain, rinse, and add to the frying pan, then pour the pesto sauce or homemade pesto on top and mix thoroughly to combine and heat the sauce. If using homemade pesto, add a few tablespoons of chicken broth to keep everything moist. Add salt and pepper to taste, and top with grated cheese.
Vegetarian? Substitute very firm, well-drained tofu for the chicken, use vegetable broth, and a Parmesan with vegetable or microbial rennet.
Roasted Tomato Caprese – Review
In addition to my job and other hobbies, I very much enjoy cooking and baking. So, I may occasionally share or review a recipe. Some of these are good for quick dinners after a long day; others, like this one, require a little more effort. This recipe comes from Ina Garten, otherwise known as the Barefoot Contessa. I saw a small portion of her "Oven Rules" episode, which features this recipe, and later looked it up on the Food Network site.
While this take on tomato and mozzarella caprese salad does require a lot of time, most of it is "inactive" - the tomatoes are easy to prepare, but they do need to sit in the oven for quite some time. The full recipe can be found here: Roasted Tomato Caprese Salad.
I halved this recipe, as I was only cooking for three people and four plum tomatoes per person is a lot when it's just an appetizer. Usually I follow a recipe to the letter the first time I cook with it, and then make adjustments accordingly, however I did make one immediate adjustment: because I couldn't find six good looking, similarly sized plum tomatoes, I cut the larger tomatoes into thirds, lengthwise.
A sheet pan or jelly roll pan is definitely necessary for this recipe - or anything with high enough sides that the oil/vinegar and tomato juices won't leak off the pan and onto the oven floor. I found that roasting the tomatoes at 275 took less than two hours in my oven - I pulled them twenty minutes early. I let the tomatoes cool, sliced some mozzarella, and arranged everything on a plate. I shredded a few basil leaves and topped the dish, then served.
While this was delicious, there are some changes I would make for next time:
- I would use smaller, more equally sized tomatoes if possible.
- I would mix all of the ingredients used on the tomatoes, then pour that over the tomatoes for a more even covering.
- It may be a good idea to experiment with temperatures and cooking time, as the whole process did take just over two hours. This is delicious, but currently not a "weeknight dish".