Week 11: Cavatappi with Sundried Tomatoes & Cannellini Beans

Recipe from the lovely Elly Says Opa!

Review: eh. Not something I think I'll make again, although we ate it and it was certainly filling, with the addition of the beans. But alas, the recipe does not win a coveted place in my recipe binder. It was just kind of bland. I think some caramelized onions and a handful of feta would have been called for. Or maybe I didn't put in enough parmesan.

I did have an amusing moment in the grocery store, where I couldn't locate cannellini beans, and remembering that in the pictures they looked like kidney beans, I bought white kidney beans.

It turns out white kidney beans ARE cannellini beans. So I learned something!

So overall, this week's recipe was a bit of a dud.

Next week, however, I'm getting excited about. I have unilaterally declared it vegetarian week (hey, when you do all the cooking, you get to do stuff like that), and I'm going to be trying something a little different. Rather than thinking about each meal independently, I'm planning to set out 5-6 dishes every night and let people choose what they want. So I'll make a bunch of stuff on Sunday (pita, hummus, tzatziki, falafel, dal, that sort of thing), then the leftovers will continue to reappear all week and new dishes will be added. And the money I would normally spend on meat will most likely go on fancy cheese, because lord do I love cheese.

Should be fun, and I have a whole bunch of recipes I want to try. I will try and take pictures of each night's meal and do a big wrap up post next Friday.

More little people

Black outer, rainbow batik inner.
Rainbow outer and rainbow inner:


Red cord outer, rainbow inner:


Rainbow paster inner, black outer:


Yep, those are little people rolls!

In Defense of Food

I've been ruminating over this book for a week or so now. I'm not going to get into a whole lot of specifics about the book itself (it's been out long enough there's a zillion better reviews out there and easy enough to find!), but I'm finding I just can't stop thinking about it and it's having a pretty profound effect on how I feel about food.

Which is kind of strange, because in this book (In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan), he doesn't say anything I didn't already know. Really, it's like he went into my head, extracted everything I know and believe about nutrition, and put it down on paper. But somehow having it all laid out coherently was absolutely mind blowing.

Or rather, it wasn't particularly mind blowing, initially. Frankly, I was reading it and feeling rather smug. Nutrition science doesn't really know jack? I knew that. I've known that since the time I was a gym rat and discovered this whole subculture of people who weren't buying the low fat dogma - and they were making sense. Avoid processed foods? Hell yeah, we've been eating like that for years. Fruits and vegetables as the basis of your diet? Yeah, I knew that. And so on and so forth.

So, I'd just finished the section of the book where he talks about how you should 'Eat Food', meaning avoiding processed food. Seems simple enough, but he argues that the problem is a lot of the stuff you might think is 'food' is really more a food type substance (ever looked at the ingredient list on a standard loaf of supermarket bread?). And yeah, feeling smug, I went to the fridge to get myself a snack.

And what should catch my eye:


That's the ingredients on the sour cream (full fat, thank you!) I've been buying for years. All that time, I never looked at the ingredients. I assumed, because I was buying, you know, sour cream, that it contained, say, milk, cream, bacteria.

WHAT THE HELL IS ALL THAT STUFF?? Why is there corn starch in sour cream? Guar gum? Carrageenan??

Now, this stuff may all be completely harmless. But it's not sour cream.

This was where my mind got totally blown. And I started reading ingredient labels of everything in my kitchen (cottage cheese? basically the same ingredient list as the alleged sour cream). And man, there's a hell of a lot more processed food in my kitchen than I thought.

What am I going to do with this? Well, for starters, I'm reading ingredient lists. I've found a brand of sour cream that contains only cream and bacteria, and a brand of cottage cheese that's the same. I'm going to be making some other changes, here and there, and focusing on keeping a wide assortment of fruit and vegetables available at all times.

But to be honest, I'm kind of pissed off about this. When and how did it become okay to say something is sour cream when it really isn't? Why should I have to obsessively read ingredient lists just to make sure that the sour cream I'm buying is, in fact, sour cream?

--

guar gum, carob bean gum, and carrageenan are thickeners, as is corn starch, of course. Sodium citrate is a preservative, as far as I can tell, as is, I assume, the citric acid. is this stuff bad for you? I don't know, but one of Pollan's arguments is if you have to start adding this kind of stuff to food, what have you taken out that makes them necessary? Processed food is often processed in ways that wind up removing a lot of the stuff that is good for us, which then has to be added back in. Frankly, I want my sour cream to be thick on its own, not because it's had a quartet of thickeners added to it.

No, this is not a food blog

I do still sew! This isn't a food blog, even if it's sort of turned into one recently. Ha. I have another food related post planned, too.

Older daughter had a birthday party to go to last weekend, so I put together a crayon case to give the birthday girl.



It came out really nicely, I have to say. I need to order more of the batik fabric I used, I love the way it coordinates together with the solid cord.

I also put together this one, with a black outer and red inner, for the Etsy shop:



Buy it here!

Week 10: Butternut Squash Ravioli

I really like butternut squash ravioli, so decided to try it this week. Butternut squash ravioli tossed in sage browned butter with spinach, pumpkin seeds, and blue cheese. Yum!

I want to try making pasta, but wasn't up to that this week (also, I want to get a pasta roller, since rolling out pasta isn't something I really want to do by hand). So I found a recipe that uses, of all things, wonton wrappers. (recipe is here)

Basically just cut eat wrapper in half, top with filling, fold in half, and crimp with the tines of a fork:



They were good, although the wrappers aren't exactly pasta like. I want to make these again with a proper pasta dough, once I get myself a pasta roller! I actually think these would be fantastic fried rather than boiled - I have leftover uncooked ones, I may try that tomorrow, with some sort of dipping sauce, maybe.

The brown sage butter/spinach/pumpkinseed/blue cheese combination is fantastic. Although I'm afraid I'm the only one who liked these! Next time I'll probably make a couple of different fillings, like a ricotta and cheese filling, which I think my family will enjoy more.

This picture is making me hungry.

Week 9: White Chicken Enchiladas

This is probably cheating, since I have, technically, made these before. However, the first time I made this I couldn't get the key ingredient, the canned chiles, and so I declare this to be a new recipe.

What? It's my blog project, I can get away with that. And, frankly, the chiles do rather change the dish completely.

The recipe is from The Pioneer Woman (find it here), and the results are very good. I used homemade flour tortillas instead of corn, which was the only substantial change. Oh, and milk instead of cream, which works OK but the resulting filling was a bit on the dry side. They were still pretty damn tasty!

One other change - I used cheddar instead of Monteray Jack cheese, because I accidentally bought WAY too much cheddar. I think these would be better with the Jack cheese, so next time I make them hopefully I won't have a kilo and a half of cheddar in the fridge. Just couldn't justify buying even more cheese when there was already over a kilogram there!



(the homemade salsa is key - just finely diced tomatos, onions, some crush garlic, salt, and cilantro. and a bit of diced up canned chile).

Week 8: No Knead Pizza Crust

Friday night has lately been pizza night around here, which is just fine with me - pizza, even made from scratch, is easy, and everyone likes it. Win-win on a Friday night!

But plain cheese pizza (which the kids prefer) gets boring. And I wanted to try a new kind of pizza crust, using a no-knead dough. Now, making pizza dough isn't exactly a hardship for me, thanks to my shiny KitchenAid Mixer, but no knead dough sounded interesting, and it's supposed to give a better texture.

The main issue with no knead dough is that you have to start it really far in advance - it needs to rise for at least 12, preferable more like 24 hours. So when I'm making dinner on Thursday night I through together the dough and let it sit on the counter until Friday afternoon.

I forgot to take the first photo, but this is what the dough looks like after about 24 hours:

It's very, very, VERY soft and sticky. When you peel it out of the bowl, you have to cover your hands very well with flour, and it'll still probably stick!

dough turned out:

Stretched out on the pizza stone:

I find this dough both easy to work with, in that it stretches nicely, and immensely difficult, in that it's so sticky!

I like to pre bake the dough for about 15 minutes so I get a nice crispy crust, then add the toppings and just heat until they are warm.

So the kids got the plain cheese pizza, but for me I got a bit fancy, with caramelized onions, roasted garlic, sundried tomatoes, olive oil, black olives, feta and bacon. Yum!



No Knead pizza crust (makes two pizzas):

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon yeast
1½ teaspoons salt
1½ cups warm water

Stir together; I usually knead it one or two times just to make sure it's well mixed. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit in a warm, draft-free place for 12 to 24 hours.

Turn out onto a well-floured surface and shape into two rough balls. Cover with a clean tea towel and let sit for about 2 hours.

Stretch or roll out the dough. I like to pre-bake the crusts in a very hot oven (450 or so) for 10-15 minutes, then top, and return to the oven for about 5 minutes. let sit for 5 minutes, slice, and enjoy!

Could it be? More little people?

Yeah, yeah, more of these. I've been too distracted by the Olympics to do much sewing.

This week's cooking post is up tomorrow. No knead pizza dough, yum!

Week 7: Tofu in Black Bean Sauce

Ahhh, tofu. One of those foods I feel like I should like, but it's always so boring and underwhelming and, well, not chicken. But one of the things I want to do with this project is try new things, so why not take a stab at tofu?

This recipe is from the Moosewood Restaurant New Classics cookbook, slightly modified. The tofu was about as meh as I remembered, but the sauce was very tasty and I will certainly make it again. Probably to marinate chicken!

Start with a block of firm tofu (actually, I think this was extra firm). The first step in the recipe was to weight the tofu for 20 minutes, but I think because I used extra firm the weight didn't really seem to do anything. Cut the tofu first horizontally into 4 pieces, then cut from the top as shown, so you get 32 triangles.

The sauce: 2 tablespoons black bean and garlic sauce, 1/2 tsp chili paste, 1 tsp sesame oil, 4 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp rice vinegar. Mix together, pour over the tofu and let it marinate for a while.

I could have used an additional tablespoon of the black bean sauce, in retrospect.


Heat some oil in a pan, and saute 3 garlic cloves, minced, and 1 tbsp fresh grated ginger just until fragrent, then add the tofu. Cook the tofu until golden brown (about 5 minutes), flip, and sear the other side. Keep the marinade, and while the tofu is cooking add to the marinade 1/3 cup of water, vegetable stock, or chicken stock, and 1 tablespoon of cornstarch. Whisk well.

Once the tofu is ready, dump in the marinade/stock/starch mixture and cook until it thickens into a nice sauce.

Serve over rice with steamed veggies on the side.


I really liked the sauce and will definitely make it again. Tastes very similar to a ready made PC sauce I used to buy. The tofu, eh. Still not a fan. The baby ate a few pieces; the older kid took the tiniest bite you've ever seen in your life then just ate the rice and the vegetables. Oh well, they can't all be winners!

Tofu in Black Bean Sauce

1 block firm or extra firm tofu
2 or 3 tablespoons black bean and garlic sauce
1/2 tsp chili paste
1 tsp sesame oil
4 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp rice vinegar
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger
1/3 cup stock or water
1 tablespoon cornstarch

Cut block of tofu lengthwise into 4 slabs. With the slabs stacked, cut from corner to corner and then once lengthwise and once widthwise to create 32 triangles.

Mix together black bean sauce, chili paste, sesame oil, soy sauce, and vinegar. Pour over tofu and allow to marinate.

Heat some oil over medium, then saute garlic and ginger briefly. Add tofu in a single layer (reserve the marinade). Cook until golden brown (about 4 minutes), turn, and cook the other side.

Mix the marinade with stock and cornstarch, whisking well. Pour over the tofu and cook until the sauce thickens. Serve over rice with veggies on the side.

Valentine's Block

I did manage to make the baby a Valentine's present. Just a basic stuffed block with some shapes appliqued on the sides. It's cute!

Circle, heart, triangle.


Not fancy, but nice! I will probably make two more in smaller sizes (the sides measure about 7" on this, making it fairly large). It would be nice to have a set of three in different sizes for stacking. Add it to the to do list...