Sunday, July 06, 2008

Wedding Food Part 3

Strawberry Spinach Salad

This is a great summertime salad perfect for a side with grilled chicken or pork.

  • Baby Spinach, washed
  • 2 Tbl sesame seeds, toasted
  • 1 quart strawberries, sliced
  • .5 cup canola oil
  • .5 cup sugar
  • .25 cup white vinegar
  • 1.5 tsp grated sweet onion
  • .25 tsp vegan Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 Tbl. poppy seeds
  • .5 tsp paprika
Mix the oil, vinegar, sugar, onion, poppy seeds, paprika, and Worcestershire sauce together in a jar. Shake well and refrigerate for at least an hour. Toss the dressing, spinach, strawberries, and sesame seeds together and serve.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Wedding Food Part 2

Island Coconut & Sweet Potato Stew w/Rice

This stew is great served by itself or over rice. We have eaten it with pita or naan bread, it is great as a main dish or side. It is very easy to make and the ingredients are found in most major grocery stores. It might closely resemble Jamaican flavorings though it incorporates Siracha, an Asian hot sauce, and Thai curry paste for heat and flavor.

  • 2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
  • 1 medium sweet onion, diced
  • 2 gloves garlic, smashed
  • 1 Tbl ginger, smashed
  • 1-3 Tbl Thai red curry paste
  • 1 tsp coriander
  • 1 tsp cumin
  • 1 16oz can lite coconut milk
  • 1 liter vegetable stock
  • 8oz red lentils
  • 15oz pureed pumpkin
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp black pepper
  • 1 Tbl Siracha, plus more for garnish
  • cilantro for garnish
Make a thick paste by mashing ginger and garlic together using a pestle and mortar or a small bowl and the heel of a wooden spoon or puree in food processor. Heat vegetable oil over medium heat in a large saucepan, add the onion and sauté until transparent. Add the garlic ginger paste and sauté another 2 minutes until fragrant; lower heat and stir constantly to avoid burning the paste. Add the cumin and coriander and sauté for a minute more. Add curry paste and sauté for another minute. Stir in the rest of the ingredients. Simmer over medium - low heat for about an hour or until sweet potato is soft and almost melting into the stew. Be sure to stir occasionally.

Garnish with cilantro and more siracha depending on level of desired heat.

Wedding Food Part 1

Spanish Gazpacho

This gazpacho recipe is one that I wrote for the wedding. I have modified it so that it is vegan by using vegan Worcestershire sauce, but you can easily substitute the real sauce that contains anchovies as well if you are not serving to vegetarians.
  • 4 Roma Tomatoes, peeled and seeded
  • 3 stalks of celery, trimmed and roughly chopped
  • 1 cucumber, peeled and seeded
  • 3.5 oz sweet onion, roughly chopped
  • .25 cup Vinagre de Jerez (Spanish sherry wine vinegar)
  • .25 cup sugar
  • 1 tsp vegan Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 whole yellow or orange bell pepper, seeded and roughly chopped
  • 1.5 tsp chopped garlic
  • .5 cup loose parsley
  • 1 48oz can of salt-free tomato juice
Puree all but the tomato juice in a food processor for at least a minute, until smooth. Pour vegetable mixture and tomato juice into a pitcher and stir. Chill well. Serve in martini glasses garnished with an olive.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Spring's First Cheeses from Prarie Fruits Farm


Saturday morning we arose to a dreary gray drizzle. We quickly got ready and I, dressed for summer in shorts and flip flops, threw on a sweatshirt and ran out into the rain to pick up Laura and get to the farm early enough to secure our long awaited prize, Angel Food from Prairie Fruits Farms. We arrived at the farm expecting to see the same activity we drove into the week before, with goats playing in the pen and families gathered around pointing out the animals to their children, while soaking in the warm spring sunshine, but alas it was a dark, dismal day and when we arrived, no one was to be found. We walked around a little and looked at the goats, walked into the sales room, saw the cheese, wild ramps and Organic spinach from Blue Moon Farms, and heard some voices coming from the cheese production rooms, yet couldn't find anyone to sell us our long awaited cheese. We eventually secured our prize, a petite 5.6oz wheel of Angel Food. As we drove back to my house to enjoy we realized we needed bread, so we quickly swung by IGA and picked up one of those Take-and-Bake baguettes. With that we grabbed some strawberries and tomatoes at Laura's and headed to my house to enjoy our spoils and not share with anyone. The cheese was just as creamy and salty and gooey as we had remembered and we ended up eating the whole wheel over a 2.5 hour sitting. Now we just can't wait until they have their Prairie Blazing Star, an aged goat cheese wrapped in Sycamore leaves and soaked in a local Illinois red wine.


On the previous night Laura and I went out to KO Fusion, an Asian-American fusion restaurant downtown Champaign that also features sushi. We had an amazing meal, although it was quite pricey. We ordered three sushi roles for dinner and stuffed ourselves with dessert. We first ordered the Solomon, the Lava and the Crunch. The Lava roll was by far our least favorite, although still quite good, just lacked in flare. They describe it as "Crabmeat, black mushrooms wrapped in smoked salmon topped w/baked sea scallops and caviar" And that is what it was, quite fishy and rather boring, like the standard Orange roll, a maki roll, rolled in small orange fish roe. The Solomon, by only a slight advantage or more complex flavors was our favorite(not to mention the most expensive). It was a "shrimp tempura roll topped with unagi , salmon, avocado, masago caviar and crunch" They also failed to mention the wonderful spicy-sweet sauces that topped the roll that truly brought it together. For those of you who are wondering unagi is smoked eel and masago is the orange fish roe that I previously mentioned. The last roll, the Crunch, was the cheapest roll and came with a mix of spicy tomato-chili sauce and a mustard based sauce. It was a roll of spicy tuna topped with masago and crushed cashews. For dessert we had a cheesecake filling that was wrapped in wonton, fried, and drizzled with a coconut-lime sauce and a sauce that had cinnamon in it. Overall the experience at KO Fusion was great and we enjoyed the meal, including the White Dragon cocktail of lychee, rum, and pineapple juice, but we might opt to try out SushiKame down the street, which we hear from friends is cheaper and just as good.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

The Return

Wow, I have been out of the blogosphere for almost a whole month. I blame classes, serving in Memphis over spring break, and the fact that I have done the most uninteresting and little amount of cooking over the past month due to my hectic schedule. But not to fear I am catering a wedding for my friends in June and I will be recreating some of those dishes for them to sample this weekend and then there should be some good posts. I also have plans for trying out a super-superfood dish that incorporates all of the superfoods mentioned over at balance. Until then, have a good day.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Cookies & Hummus & Friends

So last weekend after the Latin fundraiser dinner we spent the day baking cookies for B.'s brother's fiancé's bridal shower. Well L. also ended up with a truck load of Latin garbanzo bean salad(think roughly 6lbs) Well this salad was quite delicious in flavor as it contained chipotles in adobo, jalepenos, lime juice, olive oil, onion, tomato and lots of cilantro all marinated for a couple of hours. Well we thought we could make it better by transforming it with the help of my brand new food processor(Thanks Mom!) into hummus. What we didn't know is how much 6lbs of hummus actually is......lets just say we are still eating after giving a lot of it away.

For the hummus we mixed the salad with tahini, lemon juice, Spanish olive oil from Trader Joe's, salt, pepper, and some Sweet Ancho Roasted Red Pepper spread from Harry & David. It turned out to be a sweet/spicy Latin flared hummus. Not what you would really expect from hummus, but still a good dip. One friend of ours told me the other day she ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

While we tirelessly worked on the hummus, B. got to work on making sugar cookie dough. She endlessly rolled out dough and cut miniature cookies out for the next 3 hours, while L. and I snuck pieces of dough and "deformed" cookies. L helped decorate them with sprinkles and icing, I tried to do the whole sprinkle things, but failed miserable, I figure I will just stick to cooking.

B. did let me make my own creation with the leftover dough. I decided to make my Mii. He later went for a swim in the icing and ended up drowning and getting eaten by a shark or maybe that was me.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

A Good Day of Food


So I don't have much time to post before my battery runs out but I wanted to share with you my amazing lunch and afternoon snack I made. For lunch I started with a veggie sandwich made on 12 grain bread(yes it has lots of whole nuts and seeds, yum!). It had sweet yellow bell peppers, a sliver of red onion and fresh baby field greens. This was all topped off with vegannaise my new favorite sandwich spread. Ok so most of you are probably thinking, "what is vegannaise? It sounds disgusting!" But before you judge you must try. It is mayo made out of grapeseed oil. It replaces the egg in the traditional permanent emulsion, with soy protein and mustard flour as the emulsifier. With those ingredients, brown rice syrup, and apple cider vinegar, the vegannaise has a slightly nutty, sweet tang, right up there competing with the mysterious tang of Miracle Whip.

We also made up a great batch of corn cake, the recipe for which I got off of a friend, who found it in a cookbook she received for her wedding. It is real simple and is part cake, part cornbread, almost good enough for dessert. Once it is done baking, simply slather your piece it in butter and enjoy. The recipe is below.

This afternoon I also made tropical fruit salsa and a greek hummus with oregano, lemon juice, tahini, and cumin. Sadly there won't be much for me to enjoy since most of it is going to the women's overnighter tomorrow evening. Hopefully, although late, I will get to Lauren's pumpkin challenge this weekend and have something fun to share.


Corn Cake

  • 1 box Jiffy corn muffin mix
  • 1 box Jiffy yellow cake mix (or half of a regular one)
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup of milk
Beat eggs and milk in a bowl. Add mixes and stir until combined. Pour in a 9x9 square pan and bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Quick Dinners #1

Tonight Fuego is at PR and is eating dinner with ROTC, so I had to figure out a quick dinner I could throw together for myself before I got working on stuff. I made pork fajitas on flour tortillas with a "dollop of Daisy"TM. The peppers and onions are the seasoning mostly for this dish which has a lot of punch for the ease and speed of this dish. It took me about 15 minutes from start to finish for this.
Pork Fajitas
  • Bell pepper
  • Onion
  • pork(or any other meat)
  • black pepper
  • garlic salt
  • hot sauce
Slice the peppers and onions, toss in pan with 1 T oil. cube or slice meat, toss in pan. Add salt and pepper to taste. Saute until peppers are tender and meat cooked through. Add hot sauce for a kick in the end if you wish. Serve with sour cream on a flour tortilla.

Latin Fundraiser Dinner

So Saturday night the team from I-life that is going to Honduras put on an amazing fundraising event for the new AIDs clinic. L. organized a fantastic feast of steak and chicken fajitas, cheese and veggie enchiladas (the most amazingly gooey, unhealthy enchiladas I have had in a long time), sopapillas, pebre, guac, tortilla soup, and rice pudding and "churros" for dessert.

First off, I didn't have an fajitas, so I can't comment on those, but the sopapillas and pebre made by M. were amazing. I have heard about her sopapillas for a long time but by the time I got there to try them they were always gone. She spent a semester in Chile, so she must know her way around the amazing pebre or cilantro salsa, as it is sometimes referred to in English.

M. made the delicious broccoli and spinach cheese enchiladas, that were sinfully divine. L. also made the garbanzo bean salad that you can see on the right of my plate, which the leftovers proved to make a nice experiment for Sunday. K. made a rockin rice pudding and C. made sweet churros. The girls(and boys) did an amazing job with the fundraiser dinner and it was a lot of fun. Thanks guys.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Cajexitalian? Did I make up a new cuisine?


Ok so it really tasted much better than it looks. And by no means is it "healthy". It is what started off as a Cajun-style lasagna but what then through a series of unfortunate events (not planning, not shopping for vegetable...) It ended up with a new Mexican flair of chili beans and corn. I started off with some leftover red sauce from our pasta two nights ago and added it to the pan with the first layer or no-bake noodles. I then sauteed Andouille sausage, red onion, and green peppers in a skillet. Once that was done I added a red pepper alfredo sauce that I had laying in the back of the cupboard. Mixed the ricotta with cajun seasonings and layered the Andouille mixture first, noodles, corn, beans, ricotta, noodles, sauce. Baked it for 40 minutes at 350 and had a tasty meal with about 20 min of actual work, not bad for a weekday dinner. Plus we had FF, sugar free Jello with FF cool whip for dessert. (something had to be healthy) Stay tuned for this weekend which will hopefully be a cooking extravaganza with recipes.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

New Look

After two years of dormancy my blog has been revived and reawakened by the influence of Christy at balance and Lauren at Genki Tummy. Hopefully I will soon get into the swing of actually remembering to take pictures of what I make and eat and post it up here along with recipes. Here's to a new life for this blog!