August 17

CSA dinner. Goat cheese and mint stuffed zucchini. Angel hair pasta with tomato sauce. Mint lemonade.

Sunday morning breakfast

I've come down with a cold. It's not miserable yet, but my throat's sore and my breath's gone rotten.

I'm not normally an oatmeal for breakfast person, but this morning decided that the warm softness of oatmeal was exactly what my body wanted. (Especially since they recommend staying away from dairy product when you have a cold.)

I didn't think we had raisins, so I browsed the internet for some inspiration while my water boiled.

Ended up playing with Chocolate Oatmeal with some hints from Creme Brulee Oatmeal. Added brown sugar, coco powder, little bit of vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg to my oatmeal as it was setting. Topped it off with frozen raspberries. Another day, I might add a few pecans to it. But for now, it's just about perfect.

It might actually get me to like oatmeal.

My shirt is not yellow!

I just made a batch of mustard, so this is an accomplishment. I'd never made Nana's mustard before, my sister always helps out, but my taste so far seems right on target. (Even though for some reason I decided to use brown sugar instead of normal sugar.)

It's quick and easy, so I'm including the recipe for anyone adventurous enough to try it. It has a bit of a kick, so not recommended if you don't like a bit of spice.

Nana's Sweet-Sour Mustard

Mix: 1/4 c. ground mustard
1/4 c. sugar
2 Tbsp. flour
Dash of salt

Heat to boiling (I just microwaved it): About 1/3 c. brown vinegar

Stir in enough vinegar into dry ingredients to right consistency.

Add: 1/2 tsp. ground turmeric

Let season one day to develop flavor.

Note: Turmeric is a strong yellow dye, so be careful about getting it on your clothes.

I love summer

Nice weather.

No lessons to plan.

Time to cook. And eat. And yum!

It took me two evenings (the crust is complicated creature that needs to cool and then be baked), but the strawberry lemon curd tart is delish. I just had my first nibble. It still hasn't cooled all the way. But I think it might be worth trying variations of in the future. Blueberry lemon curd tart perhaps? Or individual sized as is? Whatever. So good.

Sweet Tooth

Yesterday my sweet tooth was wanting attention. I didn't quite want cookies. Didn't have time to make a cake. Missed ingredients to make a pie.

But I looked through some cookbooks and found a recipe for lemon squares. It sounded perfect, and it more or less was.

It should be noted that I love lemon bars, but I don't like the ones that are more crust than lemon. This one was amazing. Somehow the crust ended up on top. I need to repeat it to get a better sense of how it works. That shouldn't be too hard, I just finished the last piece and already want more.

It should also be noted that this is from a cookbook put out by the library of a small, southern town. (Other treasures in it include grits casserole, liver nips, fried chitterlings, at least three fried chickens, General Lee Bread, biscuits, biscuits, and more biscuits, and--my favorite drink name--"hop, skip, and go naked.")

I didn't have lemons on hand, so just used juice from a bottle. Didn't have an 8 x 8 pan, so I just used a pie plate. (Decided there was enough butter in the crust that I didn't need to grease it.)

Here's the adapted recipe.

Lemon Shapes

6 Tbs butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup and 2 Tbs flour
2 eggs
2 generous Tbs lemon juice
1/4 tsp. baking powder

Preheat oven to 350.

Use electric mixer to beat butter for 30 seconds. Add 1/4 cup sugar and 1/4 cup flour. (Beat with mixer and then use fork to finish mixing.) Pat dough onto bottom of pie plate. Bake in oven for 15 minutes.

While baking, beat eggs. Add 3/4 cup sugar, 2 Tbs flour, lemon juice (original called for 2 Tbs, I like lemon, so I used ~2.5 Tbs), and baking powder. Beat for 3 minutes (yay electric mixer) or until slightly thickened. Pour over baked crust. Bake in oven (still at 350) for 25-30 minutes. Until the edges are a golden brown and the center is set.

The hard part is letting it cool. But really, it's too gooey right out of the oven to eat without a spoon.

Cut into whatever shapes you're going for and serve.

A day of doing not much somehow equals a long post

Real food is important at any time. I haven't read much on the subject--but it seems like a mindset I was raised with. I do how Michael Pollan sums it up in his manifesto:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

...And you’re better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to “eat food,” which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

You can see how quickly things can get complicated.

Being sick I want real food, but don't have much energy to prepare it. A couple of recipes that seemed easy enough to prepare, despite not seeming to be out of bed for more than 2 hours at a time all day.


First, chicken. Mom's recipe for the crock pot. It turned out simply enough, despite my not having cooked a chicken any time recently. And now I'm prepared to make chicken soup in the crock pot tomorrow.

Roast Chicken

Thoroughly wash one 3-4 lb. roasting hen and pat dry.
(Patting dry ensures good browning.)

Sprinkle cavity generously with salt, pepper, and parsley.

Place in Crock Pot. Dot chicken breast with margarine.

Sprinkle with parsley, basil, tarragon, or rosemary.

Cover and cook on HI 1 hour, 15 min.; then LO 8–10 hours.
(Or to cook it faster leave it on high. I'm not sure how long it takes then. Maybe 3-5 hours?)

Second recipe is adapted from Mollie Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Basically chop up the ingredients and throw them in the oven. The pan I used was a bit big for the amount I cooked, so a little bit of burning happened, but it was still good enough to make again.

Tsimmes

1 sweet potato, peeled and chopped into inch-size pieces (or so)
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 apple, chopped (see what I mean about the chopping?)
Handful of dried apricots, chopped
Squirt of lemon juice
Pour in some orange juice
Add a little apple juice (the original recipe, about double what I made, called for 1 and 2/3 cups of juice)
1/2 tsp. salt
Sprinkle of cinnamon
Dash of ginger

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix ingredients together in bowl. Put in baking dish (apparently want it deeper rather than thinner layer). Cover (aluminum foil worked for me) and bake for a while. 1.5 to 2 hours? I went a bit over. Then again, I burned.

And it is now most definitely time for bed again.

hunkering down with tofu

The "wintry mix" outside meant that I stayed home today instead of going grocery shopping and baking Christmas cookies with a friend who lives near the store. It's been a lovely, non-school productive but gotten things cleaned, day. I haven't actually curled up with hot chocolate and a book (neither one actually), but still managed to wear PJs all day.

Wasn't really in the soup mood and I'm running "low" on groceries (enough to make it through Wednesday, no problem, could probably go a full week if necessary), so I looked online for recipes. Recently I've been looking at vegan blogs, so maybe it's not a surprise that I ended up looking at Spinach Tofu Stuffed Shells.

I had frozen spinach, because I always have frozen spinach (except I'm out now, yikes!). I had tofu, because I wanted to try cooking with it (never had before). I had canned tomatoes to make sauce. I didn't have the shells, nor do I keep rice cheese, but I decided to try it anyway. It's not pretty enough to take a picture, but, definitely worth noting for the future. My annotated adaption is below. Tofu is something that I'm learning to like. The texture of it scared me for so long. I don't like it when it's rubbery, which it can be way to often. In this dish though, it was smooth and creamy. Happy, not scary.

Tomato Sauce. Any sauce would work. This was just tonight's incarnation.
1 32 oz can crushed tomatoes
Generous shaking of basil
Sprinkling of oregano
Sprinkling of pepper
Half a dash of salt
2 cloves chopped garlic

Simmer sauce while pasta cooks and preparing noodles.

Noodles.
Half a bag of multi-colored whole wheat nugget pasta
1 package frozen spinach
1 package tofu
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
Dash of salt
Sprinkling basil

Boil water and cook pasta. Drain when done.

Defrost spinach in microwave. (I suppose it'd be nice if you knew you were doing this to just let it thaw during the day.) Squeeze extra water out.

Blend tofu, olive oil, and salt in food processor. Should be smooth.

In medium mixing bowl, stir tofu mixture, spinach, and basil together. Stir pasta in.

The Casserole
Oh gosh, start preheating the oven now. (Unless you read ahead and remembered to do this earlier.) 350 F.

Tomato Sauce
Noodle Yumminess
Cheese (I used three handfuls of grated mozzarella)

Pour tomato sauce into 9 by 13 casserole dish. Cover bottom of pan half-inch to inch thick. No, you won't use all the sauce.

Spoon out the noodle yumminess, distributing it evenly across the casserole.

Sprinkle on cheese.

Put in oven. The original recipe calls for covering for the first 15 minutes, taking the cover off and then cooking 20 more minutes. I just put it in the oven, washed dishes, remembered something about covering it, put some aluminum on, kept on cooking. I'm not really sure how long it was in. Longer than 35 minutes though. Enough time to wash all my dishes from today.


Take out and enjoy.

hoping the mango lasts through Thanksgiving

Recent comfort foods:

• Lotus tea (Tazo goodness)
• Jasmine Pearl tea (so much better than just loose jasmine because they unfurl!)
• Chocolate mousse (maybe a bit too rich. I didn't use enough cream. And really, plain chocolate chips rather than fancy ones would be fine. I think. 60% caco is too much.)
• Dried Mango
• Mixed nuts, unsalted
• Cheese-nips
• Milk
• Homemade pizza
• Scrambled eggs

I'm glad I stocked up the last time I was in a city with a co-op.

Battling the depression. There's a reason they tell you to get your support network in order before you start teaching. Thanks to everyone who listens to me gripe when I need it and who distracts me with thoughts of their lives when I need that escape. Gossip updates are amazing. Updates about the potential for gossip are even better. (Then I can ponder my advice.)

Lots of hugs to all who are comfortable receiving them.