Archive for the ‘Yum’ Category
Family. Pork. Falling Behind.
February 21st, 2009 Posted 10:01 pm
I have some catching up to do…with crazy amounts of local and out-of-state recruiting along with application review starting up at work, Matt‘s family visiting from NY, nice weather starting to roll in, and other general business, I have gotten way behind in posting yummy food, random news/things from Jezebel that excite me, adorable puppy things and other bits of things. I am also working from an interim laptop until I get a new one (long story which will probably result in a blog post ranting about the importance of customer service sometime soon), and this machine happens to have Linux on it…it’s all fine for email, Facebook, random interndet needs, but it doesn’t have all the fun blog software I had in Windows. Once I have a shiny new computer to work on, blogging will become a more regular thing…that might be the 3rd or 4th time I’ve made that claim, so we’ll see.
Moving along…
Matt’s mom and sister were in town for a weekend and it was spectacular! A long weekend full of running around and busy excitement, but we had a great time, were super excited to see them, and I was really glad that they got to spend some quality time bonding with Santana (as if she needed the attention). She was EXHAUSTED after they left. I’m sure she’ll blog about it sometime soon. In the meantime, you can see a recap of the weekend, along with some adorable pictures on Dori’s Shiny Blog.
I’m going to try and get caught up with some delicious meals we’ve been experimenting with lately. Rather than post one massive entry with all of them, I’ll do one at a time, and eventually we’ll be up to speed.
First up, in no particular order, Maple-Glazed Pork with Apples and Roasted Winter Vegetables. Although I used the pork/apples from this recipe and the veggies from this one, we didn’t completely follow the recipes because we had a random assortment of vegetables (from our CSA!) and couldn’t find apple cider at our Safeway that week.
Carrots, Garnet (or jewel?) Yams, Onions, Beets (all from our CSA box)!! This was my first time making beets and Matt’s first time eating them. As a kid I always had canned beets as a side with dinner, but I don’t remember being crazy about them. At Bastyr, they are always available on the salad bar, so I’m getting used to them…they stain everything if you’re not careful…you can see my pink-stained hand after touching the beets just briefly! I peeled them under running water and cut them quickly and we didn’t have any lasting damage. I am usually amazed by the bright vibrant colors of fruits and vegetables…look at all the nutrients!!
We bought a new peeler the other day…it has serrated edges and says that it works well on soft fruits and veggies (I think they specifically mention tomatoes). I haven’t tried it on anything quite that soft yet, but on these veggies and on the apples, the serrated peeler was spectacular! I totally recommend it! It did not work so well on carrots (I use my regular peeler to peel long, thick-ish strips that I cut in half when we make fried rice).
Here are all the veggies ready to be roasted! You can see that the beets have turned everything a little pink along the edges:
Now the pork!! Lightly coated in breadcrumbs (just enough for a crust, no egg wash or anything messy needed), and pan fried over high heat to get the crust brown. Yum! These were pre-cut thin pork medallions…straight from the store package, they didn’t need any prep work. This is my dream. I love fresh meat, and I’m really satisfied if I can break down a whole chicken or something, but this made the pork portion of the meal sooo easy. Plus, they were on sale!
Now the apples! These also came via Full Circle Farm, and we’d had them on hand for a couple weeks, so this was a great opportunity to use them, since they probably weren’t a great choice for eating out of hand. I have this nifty apple corer/slicer that works much better when the apple is peeled (it doesn’t have the sharpest of edges, which is probably best, considering I end up with a bandaid on at least one of my fingers every week). So my serrated peeler came in really handy and I made quick work of the apples, getting them right into the pan with browned pork…
This whole meal was really easy, and probably the hardest part was getting all the vegetables peeled and cut (Matt was a big help here!). This was one of the easiest pork recipes I’ve ever made, and because I had my meat thermometer, I stopped the pork as soon as the thermometer registered it at medium. It rested while I let the apples cook down and was SO tender and delicious when we ate it. Matt was stunned. The maple, mustardy, apple-y, glaze-type sauce that came from the pan was absolutely full of flavor, and it went really well with the roasted veggies. If I made this again, I’d probably ditch the yams and save those for some other dish. They got really soft and mushy (the nature of yams), and compared to the beets and carrots it was too much of a contrast for me. Regular potatoes would have worked nicely, or any other root veg…I think the original recipe uses turnips? We also had a mini salad with some lettuce from our CSA and just some shredded cheese. Needless to say, we felt super healthy after this meal and it always makes us happy when we can get so much use out of local and/or organic produce that we get specially delivered for us!
More to come soon!
January 27th, 2009 Posted 9:27 am
Last night we made a really simple, delicious and healthy dinner of spicy roast chicken breasts (cooked on the bone), steamed green beans, and mediterranean curry couscous. The chicken was rubbed with a spice mix that included cayenne pepper, white pepper, salt, dried cilantro, garlic powder, onion powder, chinese five spice…and probably some other things. After it was a little under-done (about 150 degrees), Matt basted it with a mix of peanut sauce (which we bought on sale, but you could easily make with peanut butter, soy sauce, sesame oil, etc.), cayenne pepper, and a little hoisin sauce (YUM!). It then went back into the oven until it was nearly done (~158 degrees). The finishing temperature for white meat chicken is 165 degrees, so we pulled it at 158, covered it in foil and let it rest for about 10 minutes while we cooked the green beans and the couscous (each took a little over 5 minutes). Â
I didn’t get any pictures because the kitchen was a mess (I had just finished making a coffee cake in my silicone bundt pan for work!)
…plus I was just generally frazzled trying to cook dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast on a Monday night after work, but I had to blog this because part of what made the meal spectacular was the moistness of the chicken. If you’re trying to eat healthy, chicken breasts will come up in a lot of recipes and are a really nice choice because they will work with a lot of different cuisines and flavors and they are low in fat and pretty easy to work with. The problem is that white meat chicken goes from undercooked to horribly dry really really quickly. People have a lot of tricks for guessing the done-ness of various types of meat. A lot of people will just slice into the chicken breast and see if it’s pink–the problem with this method is that meat really needs to rest before being cut in order to keep it moist. The digital probe thermometer Matt got me for Christmas is the answer! This was the second time I’ve used it–the first time, I used the preset temperature for white meat chicken but it turned out slightly dry–their preset is actually at 165, so by the time it rests, it’s gone up 5 or 10 degrees and has past the point of moistness that makes it palatable. So this second-time around, I used the manual temperature setting and got to the exact stopping point I wanted, letting the chicken finish cooking during the covered, resting stage. It was SO good! Spicy, moist, and accompanied by yummy cous cous and green beans! And I baked an extra breast of chicken that we’ll chop and use for fried rice on Thursday when our CSA veggies come in!
Dinner Success
January 19th, 2009 Posted 12:13 pm
While I was in Portland, I found this recipe for Winter Vegetable Stew with Maple Glazed Tofu in the Oregonian and thought it sounded perfect since I knew our Full Circle Farm box was going to have turnips, which I have never cooked before. I made a couple changes: I left out the fennel, used mostly chicken broth instead of water, chopped regular bok choy instead of baby (because baby bok choy was not available at the store), and cut my tofu into 16 squares instead of 8 rectangles. The other major change is that we don’t have a pressure cooker so we just made it in a normal pot, and it worked just fine. Matt helped chop all the veggies and made the glaze for the tofu, so it went pretty quickly and was super easy and pretty fast. Plus, I just heated up some of what was left (it made a giant pot of soup) and it works pretty well as leftovers–hooray!
More Yummy-ness!
January 18th, 2009 Posted 5:44 pm
Breakfast with scrambled cheddar eggs, toast (with jam and cinammon sugar), turkey bacon (not really bacon, but still delicious), and fresh squeezed orange juice from our CSA oranges!
The last time we got oranges in our Full Circle Farm box, we planned to peel and eat them as snacks, but by the time we were in the mood, most of them had gone bad. So this time I used our three giant navel oranges to squeeze some fresh organic orange juice with nothing added! It only made one small glass (a little over 1 cup of juice), but it was pretty wonderful. We shared the OJ and each had some french press coffee (Matt’s breakfast job).
A great start to the day!
Living the CSA life
January 18th, 2009 Posted 9:52 am
We are trying to maximize our use of the digital camera AND to eat lots of new healthy foods, and so this blog will probably take a food-related spin more often.
We recently joined Full Circle Farm‘s CSA, so we’re trying lots of new fruits and veggies. The first couple weeks were a little rough and a couple things went to waste, but now we’re working on making a two-week meal plan everytime we get a box (we get one small box bi-weekly), so that we can ideally eat more fruits as snacks (something we always say we’ll do, and then have a hard time following through) and use up the veggies that we’re not so used to cooking with.
After a week in Portland for work (where I stayed at the super-fun Kennedy School hotel), I was completely tired of eating out. So we planned a homemade dinner for Saturday night! We spent the afternoon in Kirkland getting the car’s oil and filter changed, buying puppy toys, building a futon, and grocery shopping! We really over-estimated how long the futon would take to put together, so dinner was SUPER late. We made a yummy basic roasted chicken, with super crispy yellow fingerling potatoes and simple steamed broccoli. So delicious! Plus, I used the drippings from the chicken to make a tasty sauce which the potatoes soaked up nicely. While we waited for the chicken to roast we had an apple and a pear for a snack and a green salad with cucumbers, tomatoes and organic croutons! Our apple, pear, potatoes, broccoli, lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes all came from the CSA! A few were from Full Circle Farm, a few were from other local NW farms, and the rest were from other organic farms farther away. So yummy, fresh and healthy!
BONUS: I got to use my new digital oven probe thermometer that Matt got me for Christmas from Williams-Sonoma! Spectacular, and so fancy!! AB would be proud.
