Grilled pizza

We finally did grilled pizza right.

The first time, we basically smoked them, which is not as appealing as you'd think. But these were quite good!

Artisan bread follow-up

I posted last week about the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. A couple people asked for me to let them know how it went, so here's an update.

I'm shocked to say that it worked pretty well. I've actually made a second batch of dough this morning, and I think I'll continue to do so. I had to return the book to the library, but the basic recipe is easy enough to memorize, but I think I'll buy the book, too.

To make the bread, there are three pieces of equipment you need: a five-quart loosely-lidded container, a pizza stone, a pizza slide (one of those wooden things you use to put the pizza in the oven), and a pan to put water in. I had the pan and the pizza stone already, but had to buy the container and slide. The slide wasn't mandatory, but it really does make it easier. The container is just a big Rubbermaid one, and I just leave the lid cracked. Both set me back about $25. The other thing you need that not everyone may have in the house is stone-ground cornmeal. That's to cover the slide and keep the bread from sticking. I had some of that.

The recipe is simple. For the dough, I had to add more water - about a quarter cup - than called for in the recipe. I think that's due to the way they have you measure the flour: you scoop it up and level it off, which compacts the flour in the measuring cup. I think if I measured properly, the amount of water called for would be fine. It's no big deal overall.

The amount of dough did, in fact, make four loaves. I was convinced that it would make more, but it really did make four reasonably-sized loaves. I never did get the "audible crackle" when I took it out of the oven like the book said I would, but the crust was crunchy and the bread itself was nice and soft.

With the price of bread rising, it seems to make sense to continue making bread like this. Flour is going up in price, too, but not as fast as the processed bread. I figure that after this batch, I'll make back the cost of the equipment I had to buy. Plus, I do like knowing exactly what is in my food.

All in all, I'd suggest giving the recipe a try, even if you don't normally have much success with baking. It's pretty simple and the results are good.

(Click on any of the photos for a bigger view)

Bread

In addition to the gardening, I've been trying to lower the grocery costs a bit by doing more cooking at home. We've never been ones to go out much, but I have been guilty of buying processed convenience foods probably more than I ought.

I'd heard about "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" on a few blogs and it sounded interesting, so I got it from the library. That's my first batch of dough rising in a five quart container.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Perception vs. reality

I was looking for a quick dinner this past Wednesday night, so I picked up a frozen pizza. It was Kashi brand, so not cheap.

Here it is:

Now, I know that packaging rarely shows what it really looks like, but this was really unappetizing. It didn't taste all that great, either. It didn't taste like roasted veggies, but veggies that were cooked with sugar. Far too sweet.

Oh well. I could have made a homemade pizza for just a little more effort and it would have been better. I shouldn't be so lazy.

Happy Valentine's Day!

New cookbooks

For Christmas, I got a bunch of new cookbooks, so I've been doing a fair amount of cooking. When I worked four days a week instead of five, I did a lot more cooking. Since I've been working at OSU, I haven't been cooking nearly as much as I used to. I'd like to get back to doing that, so I got some new cookbooks for inspiration and recipes.

I'm not really big on following recipes; I tend to view them as starting points and suggestions, but I still like having someone else come up with the basic ideas for me. Two of my three new cookbooks I had previously gotten from the library, so I knew I liked them. One, I bought on Amazon reviews alone.

125 Best Vegetarian Slow Cooker Recipes is one of my new ones. From it I've made Sante Fe Sweet Potato Soup and Caribbean Pepper Pot Soup. I know that when I got it from the library about a year ago, I made something then, too, but I don't know what. However, I liked it enough the book, so it must have been good. Both of the recipes that I remember trying were really good, and had the added bonus of being super-easy to make since they just get tossed in the slow cooker and cook while I'm at work.

The only big downside to the cookbook is that a lot of the cookbooks use mushrooms, which Jeff doesn't like and absolutely refuses to eat (except in small quantities when he doesn't know he's eating them :). Other than that, there's lots of stuff in here that I'm looking forward to making.

I got another slow cooker book, too: Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. Again, I especially like that I can toss the stuff in the slow cooker and just ignore it until I get home. I know I made something from it when I got it from the library a couple years ago, but I can't remember what now. But like before, I liked whatever it was enough to add it to my "buy it when I get around to it" list.

Today, I put all the ingredients together for Farmhouse Fricassee, which is veggies with tempeh, basically. That's for dinner on Wednesday, when I have knitting and not a lot of time to make dinner.

That's one of the things I like about the book; it uses different proteins, not just beans and tofu. Not that I don't like beans and tofu, but they get a little dull after a while. There's even a recipe for making your own seitan in the slow cooker. I'm not sure I'll ever do that, but it's nice to have the recipe if I decide to.

The third book, One-Dish Vegetarian Meals, I got on Amazon word-of-mouth alone. It's written by Robin Robertson, who also wrote Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, so I was pretty sure I'd like it, and I was right. I made the Southwestern Pasta Gratin last week, and it was pretty good. It all hinged on the quality of a bottled salsa/picante; I think maybe next time I'd use a different one, since the one I used wasn't quite the flavor I wanted. But that's not the fault of the recipe, but my choice.

Today, for later in the week, I did all of the prep work for Ziti with Red Pepper-Walnut Pesto and Creamy Noodle Curry. The Red Pepper-Walnut Pesto is pretty good all by itself, even before there's been a chance for the flavors to blend.

I'm going to get another cookbook by Robin Robertson, too, the Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook. I just got it from the library, and the stuff I've made from it so far have been really good. I've never really liked a cookbook author before, but I seem to like Robinson's stuff!

Garden update

It's been a while since I posted pictures of the garden, so I thought I would.

This little bed along the fence used to have our lettuce and spinach and kale in it. Once the weather got warm, however, it was given over to Swiss chard and some "leftover" pepper plants from a coworker. You can also see the nasturtiums that are keeping the fig tree company.

I need to harvest some of the Swiss chard before it starts to shade the peppers again. Good thing we like it, since it grows like crazy!

This is the first year that I'm growing eggplant, but I seem to be doing well. One of the plants has five eggplants on it. This one has two, but they're starting to turn purple.

In addition to the peppers my coworker gave me, I've got another container with ones that I raised from seed. These were a mix, so I've got some green bell peppers, as well as some purple and red ones, too.

My tomatoes are producing, but they look like crap. These are the Mr. Stripey heirlooms, which are doing OK.

I used to have tomatillos in the same bed as these tomatoes, but they were doing horribly, so I yanked them up. I'll probably plant a fall harvest of kale in their place in a month or two.

My tomatoes may not be look nice, but my basil looks fantastic.

I'll be making pesto this weekend.

This picture is for my Auntie Connie

My Aunt Connie in Louisville just subscribed to my flickr photos (and possibly my blog), and mentioned how much she liked my lunches. So I photographed one in my big container for her.

I used this to carry veggies as car snacks on our trip this weekend, and it worked wonderfully. It was one of the rare times on the weekend that I had veggies (the other time was at the wedding reception - great food!).

Today's lunch was black beans and rice, a spinach salad, apples, steamed broccoli and red peppers, and some Japanese dark chocolate.

So nice I packed it twice!

My new bento box holds just about the perfect amount of stuff. And as an added bonus, the dividers go all the way up the the top, unlike so many divided containers. That keeps stuff from getting into the other compartments. I love this bento box!

I didn't know what I wanted for dinner last night, but I knew what I wanted for lunch, so I made that instead. The big compartment has udon with veggies (and soy and sweet chili sauce that's not in the photo). The top small one has roasted tofu and steamed snow peas. The bottom one has a cream corn croquette, a pair of cherry tomatoes, and some edamame.

A nicely pan-Asian lunch. Yum.

New bento box!

A great friend who understands (or at least indulges :) my love of bentos of all shapes and forms. So I got a package full of all sorts of fun stuff, including a new bento box!

It's hot pink and lime green, even - one of my favorite color combinations. It comes with a fork and knife that snap onto the lid and have a cover to keep them in place. I don't know why it has both, since I nearly snapped the cutlery in half trying to get them loose. Maybe in case of a nuclear explosion, they wanted to make sure you had your plastic cutlery? :)

I've made a nice hot-weather lunch to go in it for today. It's a little random, but a very good combination of stuff.

I've got one of my recent favorite things in it: faux-chicken salad. I go through these phases every so often, and right now is one of those times. I make it with Morningstar Farms' Chick'n Strips (chopped up), celery, pepper, spring onion, dijon mustard, mayo, and Miracle Whip. Very tasty.

Lunchtime

How can I have tons of food and nothing to eat? I feel kind of guilty saying that, knowing how many people are starving, but it's still how I feel when I look in the fridge.

This is a cobbled together lunch mostly because I just couldn't decide what to pack. Doesn't really matter. I'm still eating at my desk. But I should be done with that by the end of the week. I'll be very glad when it's over, though. At least nine hours a day is getting a little old, you know?

PS: Sorry to feed readers who may have been inundated with republished posts. I was updating labels last night to make things easier to find on here. Sorry!

Super-quick gazpacho

Don't let the chopping fool you. This only takes about 10 minutes to make. And since it's best made ahead, you can do it whenever you have a few spare minutes.

Ingredients
1/3 cup chopped red, yellow or orange pepper (not green)
2/3 cup sliced spring onion, white and green parts (about 3 onions)
1 cup chopped peeled & seeded cucumber
1 cup chopped cilantro
1-2 cloves minced garlic
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
24 oz. tomato-based veggie juice (like V-8)
1-2 tsp crushed red pepper (optional)
Salt to taste

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients in a non-reactive bowl and let flavors blend for at least 1 hour before serving.
2. Serve plain or with a dollop of sour cream or plain yogurt and garnished with chives.

I like a chunky gazpacho, but if you like yours smooth, blend the veggies and cilantro in the food processor with about 1/4 cup of juice and then add to the rest of the ingredients.

If you want, you can use half cilantro and half flat-leaf parsley.

This recipe is also a great way to sneak veggies into those who won't normally eat them. :)

I like to cook

I know that will come as no surprise to many of you, but it was thrown into sharp relief for me this past week when we couldn't use our kitchen sink. Our drain pipe, you see, had rusted through, and it took a week to get it fixed.

You'd be surprised at how often on the average day you use your kitchen sink, especially if you cook. Today, every time you use the sink, just think about it. I couldn't do much cooking, let alone anything else.

I'm planning on making up for it this week. :)

Since I'd done my shopping before we discovered, the leak, I still have lots of food from last week's shopping. The photo above is the entirety of this week's market trip.

I also picked up some radishes, strawberries, and grape tomatoes at the Clintonville Farmers Market on Saturday. It's the first time I've been, though it's quite close. It was nice, but it'll be a little better in a few weeks. Lots of bakers, strangely enough. Just four or five truck farmers, but it's a little early in the season for most locally grown produce.

I'll try to blog if I make anything good this week. Maybe even put up my super-simple gazpacho recipe.

Lunchtime

I've been eating my lunch at my desk, trying to make up some time that I took off for Las Vegas - I haven't earned enough vacation yet to cover it all. So I've been trying to make my lunches particularly good to give me a happy little break while I still work.

This is tuno salad and crackers with a salad with spinach from our garden, and some fruit salad with mint from the garden. And an Almond Joy. That was probably the best part. :)

I'm a little more than halfway done with making up my hours, and then I can go back to eating my lunch at the picnic table out in the garden outside my office.

It's spring...

... and that means the FalconCam, a springy lunch, and crappy weather on the way.

Salad

Jeff and I traveled to Youngstown this past weekend to visit my family. This is a rare thing, since Jeff is deathly allergic to cats and mom has seven (indoors. There are four feral outdoor cats she takes care of, too). Jeff survived with only some stuffiness after drugging himself to the gills, so we'll probably do it again.

What does this have to do with salad? Well, I stuffed myself on perogies and Wedgewood Pizza all weekend, so salad and applesauce for lunch today to make up for it. :)

Baked potato lunch

I've been wanting to do a baked potato for lunch for a while now, and I finally got around to it. Even though it's a small potato, it fit best in my big bento box. There's chipotle salsa for the potato.

I've also got a salad with dried cranberries and pinenuts, fruit salad with mint, and pepper and red onion with balsamic vinegar and slivered almonds, and a few meringues.

Carrot cranberry walnut baby bundt cakes

I hit the thrift stores yesterday, and picked up a Nordicware baby bundt pan. $35 on the site, and I got it for $3. That makes me so happy.

So, to celebrate, I made carrot cranberry walnut baby bundt cakes, adapting a cupcake recipe from my new Cupcakes Galore cookbook. I lightened it up considerably, replacing half of the oil with pureed prunes, and reducing the sugar and walnuts. I also used egg replacer instead of eggs and used self-rising flour in place of the flour and baking powder (because I had it and it loses its potency over time, so I'm trying to use it up).

They tasted wonderful and are awfully cute.

How to hardboil quail eggs

To hard boil quail eggs, put in pan, covered with 1 inch of cold water. Add a splash of white vinegar. Bring to a boil, uncovered, over medium heat.

When the water comes to a boil, remove from heat and cover. Let sit for four (for originally room-temp eggs) or five (straight-from-the-fridge cold eggs) minutes.

After the time is up, drain out the hot water and rinse with cold water. Fill pan with ice and cold water and let the eggs sit until they are completely cold. Peel.

(Chicken egg in photo provided for size comparison with quail eggs.)

Yes, I've been into cupcakes lately

Technically, though, these are fairy cakes, a specific type of British cupcake.

The recipe, translated for Americans, is:

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 lightly beaten eggs
1 cup self-rising flour

• Cream butter and sugar together.
• Mix in eggs a little bit at a time.
• Mix in flour by hand.
• Bake at 350° for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown.

You can add in 1/2 cup of currants, sultanas, or whatever. I add in a 1/2 tsp of vanilla.

The frosting is my standard: butter, milk, vanilla, and powdered sugar until it's the right consistency.

Mmmm ... cupcakes

I needed to use up my leftover blood orange frosting, and I found heart-shaped silicone cupcake molds half-price at Meijer today, so cupcakes it was.

The recipe is the yellow cake from Small Batch Baking, which makes five nicely-sized cupcakes, topped with necco wafers and jellybeans. Yum!

Happy Valentine's Day

(blood orange chocolate cake with blood orange frosting)

End of Use It Up Week

My last lunch was getting a little random, since we ran out of fruit and were pretty much out of veggies other than the broccoflower. Had enough cabbage left to make more lime wasabi coleslaw, though!

Overall, I think Use It Up Week went well. It was even used as a theme for two lunch groups on flickr! Personally, I made a big dent in the stuff in the fridge, pantry, and freezer, so I'm pleased with how it went.

Here's the fridge after Use It Up Week:

Pretty empty, except for the condiments, of course. Though we really did use up quite a few of them, even though you can't tell. Click here for the photo of what the fridge looked like last week.

Do-it-yourself soup

Mmmm. Soup.

It snowed a few inches last night, so it seemed like a soup day. On the right, you can see my soup all taken apart, ready to be combined and heated up in the office microwave.

There's veggie dumplings, fried tofu, carrots, green onion, snow peas, yellow pepper, and soba. The base was a soy ginger broth from Trader Joe's. Also included were fruit salad and a cream bun.

And here's the soup all put together! Very yummy. Very filling. Perfect for a cold, snowy day.

In addition, I used up an apple, a kiwi, and the tofu with this lunch. Plus, though I opened a new bag of dumplings, now they're in the upstairs freezer so we'll eat them.

The discoveries of Use-It-Up Week

Use-It-Up Week is a week of discovery. Sometimes, those discoveries are fantastic, "hey, these go great together!" moments of synergy. More often, they're of the "good thing I found this is time!" variety. The sweet potatoes in today's lunch are an example of the latter type of discovery.

Not that the sweet potatoes aren't good with their topping of sour cream and salsa (used up the salsa!), but I discovered them just as they were about to turn into soup without the benefit of a pot.

So I sliced off the nasty bits, and using my new, how-did-I-live-without-you chopper, I diced then roasted them. They probably could have stayed in the oven a smidge longer, but they were still good.

Other lunch items are a salad with cranberries and gorgonzola with blush vinagrette (didn't use anything up, but I'm close on the lettuce, and I used up a different dressing for use with my morning snack!); a faux-chicken patty with mayo and mustard packets discovered lurking in the lunch drawer (yes, I have a whole drawer for all my lunch accoutrements, thank you); and more chocolate cherry strudel (that'll probably be gone by tomorrow).

First Use-It-Up Week lunch

As I sit here, huddled in my heaviest winter coat in my office, I'm really looking forward to my lunch today.

The fruit salad used up a star fruit, a blood orange, a kiwi, and some more of the kumquats. The peanut noodles used up the last of a jar of peanut butter, a red pepper, and last week's celery. The lime wasabi slaw used up the remains of a jar of mayo. And the chocolate cherry strudel used up a can of cherry pie filling.

Food will probably be getting a little weirder later in the week, but this lunch should be quite good!

Jim Beard's Complete Cookbook for Entertaining

I also go this from the thrift store yesterday.

It's from 1954, and pretty entertaining. And even better because it only cost me 30 cents. This will go in Jeff's tiki bar room.

Grocery shopping for Use-It-Up Week

I did my shopping for Use-It-Up Week, and I bought way less than usual! This is it:

And here's what the fridge looks like at the beginning of Use-It-Up Week:

And I've decided what we're having for dinner tonight: pasta with goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes, caramelized onions, and spinach. Not bad for stuff out of the fridge!

Use-It-Up Week

As I was making my lunch last night, I realized that I have lots of open containers of food, half-used items, and generally, just a lot of stuff in my fridge and cupboards. So I'm declaring next week to be Use-It-Up Week.

Normally I do my grocery shopping on Friday, but this week, I'm only going to buy stuff that we're actually out of (or are going to run out of, and we actually use consistently every week, like celery and limes and toothpaste). Nothing new that's for a specific meal. I'm going to try to use what I have already to feed us this week.

We're certainly not going to starve. We have pasta, polenta, plenty of canned goods, our freezer is stuffed, and we've got eggs and cheese. We could, at minimum, eat a different omelet for dinner at least three nights. I'm thinking a spinach and goat cheese omelet sounds tasty. That's not deprivation. But it does use what we have.

Anyone else have cupboards and fridges that are stuffed? Interested in joining in on Use-It-Up Week? If you are, here are some online recipe searches to help you come up with ideas for using what you have. They all allow you to search by ingredient.

• Allrecipes
• iVillage
• BBC
• Cooking.com
• FoodieView

I'll let you know how it goes.

Comfort food

It's been really cold lately, so today's lunch was comfort food.

The chili was a quick chili I made last night after dinner. I made it with half faux-burger and half soyrizo. I love soyrizo. It's hard to find around here, and when I found it in a store I don't normally go to a couple weeks ago, I bought all they had. It's wonderfully spicy and is wonderful in chili. It's also equally tasty on bread with melted cheese. Yum!

I also made cinnamon baked apples. Just because they're really, really good. :)

Quail eggs

I've not had good luck with quail eggs from the Asian market in the past, but I decided to try them again. And they were good and hardboiled up very nice. Plus, they're awfully cute.

And, they're way lower in calories and such than chicken eggs. However, you can get much of the same egg flavor with less egg if you use quail eggs. Plus, did I mention they're cute?

This lunch also includes kumquats! Yum!

Tangerine peel cutouts

When I was peeling my tangerine, I managed to get some big pieces, and because I just bought some itty-bitty cookie cutters, I made little farm animal cutouts to grace my lunch.

Hee! They're so cute.

Chocolate + ginger = YUM!

I really wasn't positive the combination would be what I wanted, but I was wrong - it was wonderful!

Baby baked potatoes

Hee. They're so cute. :)

Mr. Bento goes south of the border

This contest thing is fun. It's making me spice up - ha! - my usual boring lunches. I don't think I'll win, but I'm having a blast participating!

Amazingly, most of this lunch was made with stuff I normally keep around the house. The only thing I had to buy specially was a plantain. There's cauliflower with chipotle salsa and goat cheese, black beans & rice, plantains & mangoes with butter, rum, cinnamon & coconut; and sweet potatoes with orange juice, green onions & red pepper.

Yum!

Around the world with Mr. Bento!

I seem to be back into cooking lately. Sometimes I can't be bothered to even make a burrito. This weekend, I pulled out the cookbooks and cooked a lot.

Since I'm still working on the Mr. Bento contest (and having even more fun coming up with vote-worthy entries), I decided to go with a theme for today's lunch: wold cuisine. I knew what three of them would be. It was the fourth one that was hard. But then I found it: veggies in peanut sauce from Africa.

The sauce is actually peanut-tomato, and that frightened me a bit. But it's really, really good! And it made twice as much sauce as we needed, so I just froze the rest, and it'll make a good meal next week, maybe. Quick, too. Making the sauce is the time-consuming part; the veggies cook in under ten minutes.

The cake is another one from that Small Batch Baking I mentioned last week, and this cake is fabulous! I'll definitely be making more of these. Actually, tonight I plan to mix up batches of the dry ingredients and put them in ziplocs in the freezer, ready for mixing with the wet ingredients for quick cakes.

The baby focaccia is from a batch I made with toppings of all sorts. This was the most photogenic. :) And the spicy potato cakes are my answer to Thai fish cakes. They're not perfected yet, but I'm close!

Mango Coconut Granola

3.5 cups old fashioned rolled oats and/or other grains
1/4 cup wheat germ (optional)
1/4 cup canola oil
1/4 to 1/2 cup honey (to taste)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 cup slivered almonds or chopped macadamias
1/4 cup dried shredded unsweetened coconut
3/4 cup dried mango, chopped small

1. Mix the oats, wheat germ, oil, honey, spices, and almonds together. Cook in a 300 oven for 25 minutes, stirring every five minutes, or until lightly brown.

2. After 20 minutes, add the coconut and stir well. Bake for five more minutes.

3. When it's nicely browned, remove from the oven and add the mango. Cool completely. Stores in the refrigerator for two weeks, if you can make it last that long. :)

Itty-bitty heart-shaped cake

I got a book from the library called Small-Batch Baking, and I was inspired last night to make cake.

I made plain yellow cake (because I had all the ingredients readily available), with a cream cheese coconut frosting (that I made up myself because I was too lazy to get the book back off the shelf when it was time to frost the cakes). I topped it with toasted coconut, mostly so it would look better in the photo. :) They turned out pretty good. The cakes themselves got a smidge over-done, but that was my fault, not the recipe's.

I'll probably make another couple cakes to determine if this is a cookbook I want to buy, but I'm guessing it might be. I'm thinking a baby chocolate cake layer cake with strawberry preserves and buttercream frosting. And maybe a little carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.

Other stuff in the lunch is spinach salad with egg, a polenta nest with balsamic steamed greens, and steamed "cheddar" cauliflower with red peppers.

Mr. Bento contest on flickr

So you might be seeing more lunch photos because there's a contest over on the Mr. Bento Porn photo pool at flickr. I know I won't win, but it doesn't hurt to try.

This is today's lunch (which I actually made last night and photographed at home). The rice noodles with veggies and sauce are one of my favorite treats. Especially since they're usually leftovers from spring roll making, and therefore, quite simple. I'm doing it in the opposite order this time, with spring rolls on tap for tomorrow with the leftovers from this.

(Click on the photo if you want more exact details on what's in the lunch. I'm too lazy to type it all. :)

For those of you who thought you might be missing something

You're not.

My lunches are still the same old thing.

It is pretty amazing how many veggies one can stuff into that big container, though. I'm stuffed!