Pinterest Foodie Project: Valentine's Day

Having had the day before Valentine's Day off from work, I decided to spend the day doing a little cooking. I had found a recipe for preparing chicken for chicken tacos and decided to try it out. It involved my crockpot, which was why I waited until my day off (I'm still not comfy with leaving a crockpot on for almost nine hours while I'm at work). I chose to cook the chicken for enchiladas instead of tacos, since tacos would have involved having to buy veggies and I was a little low on money (surprise, surprise). I only used three chicken breasts, so I halved the other ingredients as well. I cooked the chicken on high for about two hours and then low for another two and a half. With about an hour left in cooking time, I added a little enchilada sauce to the chicken. Once the chicken was ready, I basically just used the recipe on the can of enchilada sauce to prep my enchiladas.

The enchiladas were definitely a hearty dish, but came out a little spicier than I expected considering I just used a medium sauce. Also, I chose a red sauce instead of green, as you can likely tell from the above photo.

In celebration of Valentine's Day, I thought dessert was fitting. Naturally, Pinterest had many Valentine's themed desserts. I opted for something I already had ingredients for: brownies! A lot of the recipes I found contained actual chocolate, but I wanted to utilize the cocoa powder I already had. I did have a few chocolate chips leftover from other baking projects, so while the chocolate in the brownies was mostly from the cocoa powder, I did throw the chocolate chips in for extra measure. I also wanted to make the brownies look more...Valentiney, so I made a mixture of powdered sugar, milk, and red food coloring and drizzled it atop the brownies after they came out of the oven. You can find the brownie recipe I used here.

I did have to cook the brownies a little longer than the recipe called for, but that was because I used a smaller dish. (My 9x13 was being used for the enchiladas.) I baked both dishes at the same time and they both got done relatively close to one another, so it worked out well. The brownies were delicious, if not as fudgy as the recipe would have hinted, and after I had a couple for myself, I took them to work and shared the rest with my co-workers. Generous? Yes. But I did it mostly because I'm trying to diet and couldn't have a dozen of brownies lying around the house tempting me.

Pinterest Foodie Project: Tuna with a Kick

Taking a cue from a Martha Stewart recipe I found on Pinterest, I recently tried my own version of a spicy tuna melt by mixing a can of tuna in water with a few teaspoons full of medium salsa.

With the tuna on a piece of wheat bread, I drizzled a generous amount of monterey jack cheese on the top and toasted it in the oven until the cheese had browned. Trying to stay low-cal, I ate my melt with a single dill spear. Delicious!

Pinterest Project: Healthy Pizza

Lately I feel like I've been spending more and more time experimenting with recipes from Pinterest. Over the last several weeks, I have really hit the "get healthy" thing hard. I've had fried food once in the past three weeks, and I've tried to cut down on "treats". In addition to working out, of course. A couple nights ago, I had some chicken tenders defrosting in the refrigerator and couldn't think of anything to do with them. I was searching for things to do with BBQ chicken, as that is a sauce I always have on hand, and found several things including cauliflower. This reminded me of the concept of the cauliflower crust pizza that I had seen recipes for before but never tried. I got it in my head that minute that that is what I would make for dinner. I found this recipe for the crust, and decided on pineapple as additional topping (gotta hit that food pyramid). The only problem: I had no cauliflower. So after I got off work, I headed to Kroger, and went ahead and completed my bi-weekly shopping so I wouldn't have to go back again after payday.

Cut to an hour later, and I'm finally at home with my supplies. I first put my chicken in the oven, slathered in barbecue sauce, so that I could be working on my crust while that was cooking. Let me just warn you if you have never grated cauliflower before: it takes FOREVER. I never use a grater. I never had the reason to own one either, since it's really just recently that I've really gotten into cooking. So, stupid me, I start grating by moving the florets from side to side across the grater. I felt like I was getting nowhere. I mean, I was still going when my chicken was done baking. Then I realized it was more efficient to move the florets up and down, and the grating went much quicker at that point. I only had to have one cup of cauliflower, but it took me about 30 minutes and I had very few florets left at the end. (The recipe I had stated one head of cauliflower should be enough for 3 cups. This is a lie!)

Then it was time to mix the ingredients.

I did not have garlic salt, so I left this out, and I also did not brush the crust with olive oil prior to baking, mostly because I was afraid of using too much and affecting the texture/taste of the final product.

The crust browned around the edges very quickly, but the center was a little sticky, so I left it in for a while longer. I would say in hindsight that my crust probably could have been a little larger, but I was afraid of having thin spots and my sauce falling through. After I felt the crust was well-cooked, I pulled it out of the oven and put a thin layer of barbecue sauce over the crust. I covered the crust with pieces of chicken that I had sort of tried to shred with two forks while my crust was baking. The chicken didn't shred so much as just tear into pieces, but what the hell? As long as the pieces were placed in such a way that I could still cut into the crust, I wasn't worried about it. Then I threw on a little pineapple and topped it off with shredded monterey jack cheese.

The end product was fairly good. I was pleased with my topping combos, although it could have stood to have a little more cheese. The only bad thing was that the whole pizza ended up just being four small slices, three of which I ate right then. (It was an hour and a half past my normal meal time. I was kind of hungry.) The crust tasted mostly like egg, and while I didn't mind it, it was definitely a weird thing to have on the bottom of the pizza when I'm used to having bread products there. I don't regret trying it though, and it is probably something I would make again. But now I know a little better, and hopefully the end result would turn out more appetizing. Maybe I could use a little less egg in the crust and a little more cauliflower? Who knows? It's worth a shot, and I'd definitely recommend the recipe to anyone looking to try a low carb diet.

Pinterest Project: Muffins!

I love muffins of pretty much any kind. I had some bananas that were blackening rather rapidly, so I decided to hold on to them and find a banana muffin recipe. I looked at several recipes through Pinterest and pretty quickly I found one that seemed simple and didn't require a lot of work so I decided to go with that one.

Here's the recipe.

Unfortunately, I discovered after I already started to mix the ingredients that I had no flour or cinnamon. Fortunately, I live a quarter of a mile from Kroger, so I left the pre-heating oven on and covered my bowl so the cat wouldn't get into it, and went and picked up the remaining ingredients. Now, I tend to like my bananas a little riper than the next person. In fact, I have scolded co-workers upon finding perfectly good-looking bananas in the trash. So the fact that you are supposed to put fairly ripe bananas into banana bread recipes excited me just a little. I only had two bananas left from my recent grocery trip (prior to the emergency Kroger run), so I decided to halve the recipe so I wouldn't risk my muffins not being banana-y enough. That also kept me from eating a dozen muffins in three days. The other half banana I had left made for a nice little pre-baking snack.

Now, I also didn't have any nuts, so I decided to put a sweet little twist on my muffins. While they were still piping hot and just out of the oven, I melted a piece from a Hershey bar I had in my cabinet and drizzled it on the tops of the muffins. Mmmm. Nothing better than chocolate and banana, right?

I have to say, they were quite good. I may use this recipe more often. I mean, it's always nice when I don't make a complete mess or destroy a household appliance while cooking.



Pinterest Project: Epic Foodie Fail

Fall is here, which means all I want to do is cuddle up on the couch, drink hot tea, eat soup, and never leave my house. Out of all the soup recipes I have found on Pinterest lately, the one I thought sounded the simplest to prepare was a roasted cauliflower and white cheddar soup. The recipe I worked with can be found here.

I had to purchase most of the ingredients specifically for the soup, as I don't keep my pantry stocked for occasions like this at all. I went out of my way to travel to Whole Foods for the aged white cheddar (two different Krogers did not have ANY aged cheeses in their deli department). I bought bakery-prepared bread to dip in the soup. Prep started out pretty normal for me. I had slight difficulty with the onion chopping, as always, although I didn't tear up terribly bad. My house did smell like onions until I took out the trash a couple days later, and in fact my cutting board still reeks, but that will eventually dissipate. Also, when it came time to shred the cheese, I basically just had to shave it, as I do not own a grater and wasn't about to buy one just for one recipe.

Everything went fairly smoothly as I began cooking the soup mixture. It smelled amazing.

Now, this is where the project went wrong. I managed to pour the steaming hot soup into my blender without spilling much. Maybe I should have done this blender thing differently. After all, the recipe does mention something about a stick blender (I have no idea what that is.) I turned the blender on and immediately the lid buckled and some liquid escaped. Okay, no big deal. I turned off the blender and readjusted the lid and tried again, this time placing a towel over the lid to absorb any liquid that might get out. I turned the blender on and soup sprayed EVERYWHERE. It wasn't until the blender was off and I had lifted the towel that I realized why. The cap portion of the lid had fallen all the way through the center and into the blender. I unplugged the blender and poured everything back into the pot. This is what the cap looked like when I fished it out of the soup.

I went ahead and added the cheese and milk to the soup mixture and fished out the plastic I could find, but unfortunately, when I tried to eat a small bowl of the soup I still found several shavings. I decided it wasn't worth the digging and just tossed the soup after letting it cool. I was very disappointed in the inability of my blender (which I rarely use) to hold up under pressure. I have yet to decide whether I will try this recipe again. The most disappointing part of this whole thing was the money I spent on the cheese alone. I can always use cheese, I suppose. I just never thought I would spend so much money on a recipe only to have to throw it out. All the ingredients I had to purchase only came out to $7 or $8, but still, I might as well have eaten one meal out instead of pouring four servings worth of soup into the trash.

If you try this recipe, proceed with caution. Might I suggest a food processor for pureeing instead of a standard blender.

Makeshift Foodie Project

This week I also decided to try to make some onion rings, as I had purchased an onion at the grocery for the pizza casserole but opted not to use it once I re-worked the recipe. I've used eggs in the past to help coat things, so I thought a little flour seasoned with salt and pepper would coat the onions sufficiently.

I hate cutting onions. I worked at a ballpark concession stand one summer and had to cut onions almost every day. I could never do it without my eyes burning immensely, so I thought this time I'd try some no-cry tips for cutting onions. I used the overhead fan on my oven, burned a candle next to the cutting board to help absorb some of the fumes, and I also rinsed the onion multiple times in hot water while slicing it. I did all this while breathing through my mouth instead of my nose. I still had some tears and burning in my eyes by the end, although it wasn't near the experience I usually have. I tried. The real problem I ran into was my laziness. I only wanted to have to put the rings in the oven one time, so I cooked multiple rings together until my tray was full. See?

This turned out to be not such a great idea. The rings in the center of larger rings didn't get brown enough, while the thinner ones were dangerously close to burning by the time I was done. I think I had the oven on 425 still, as I did these the same day I cooked the potato. I may have bumped it down to 400. Here's the finished product:

The onions themselves were done enough, so I had no problems there. However, I would not recommend coating with mere flour. All I could taste was onion and flour. They didn't have that great crispy taste that fried restaurant rings tend to have. They certainly weren't terrible, but they could have been far better. If I attempt this again, I will certainly try with a different coating or batter.

Pinterest Project: More Foodie Ventures

I mentioned my newfound fascination with Pinterest in my last post. I've found several recipes on there, but there are a lot I haven't tried due to the fact that I'm only one person, and cooking for one is a bitch. It's easy to make casseroles and large dishes, but I have to eat on them for so long that by the time I'm done, I am so sick of whatever I prepared that I won't eat it again for months. This happened last week with the dish I posted about, the pizza casserole. It was delicious, but by the second day of eating two meals worth of this, I was over it. Fortunately, I was able to share a serving with a friend of mine who thoroughly complimented me.

I also mentioned last time that I was looking for avocado recipes. I decided to go with an avocado-banana smoothie recipe that I found online. This was decent, but it was a little too thick and a little too heavy on the banana flavor for my taste, so I'm still looking to expand on this avocado trend.

One foodie project I tried this past week was one I had spotted a while ago but just hadn't attempted yet. Another was one I stumbled upon and tried almost immediately after discovering. The first was a twist on the baked potato. Here's the photo:

The instructions were to cut thin slices in a whole potato, almost all the way through but not quite. (As you can see, the one in the picture also contains chives.) Drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, sprinkle some parmesan on top, and bake at 425 for 45 minutes. I had a pretty simple time cutting through the potato.

I didn't have any parmesan, so I decided to use some shredded mozarella I had left over from the pizza casserole. Knowing how cheese behaves in the oven, I waited until the potato was almost done before throwing some mozarella on there. It still browned a little more than I intended, but it tasted fine. I didn't have to leave the potato in for but about 35 minutes. It came out like this:

The next thing I tried was a "mug cake", which in this instance was more like a mug cookie. It was ingredients for a single chocolate chip cookie dough cake mixed in a coffee mug and cooked in the microwave. It only took a minute, minute and a half and the clean-up was amazing.

Click here for the link. As you can see, I did not use chocolate chips, but I did have part of a dark chocolate bar on hand, so I broke that up into small pieces and used that instead of the chips.

Ta-da! All that was left was to top with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and I was good to go.

The first few bites while the cookie was still warm were quite delicious. I'm not sure if the ice cream softened it up or what, but once I got further down the cookie/cake was just too spongy and chewy for my taste, so I threw the rest of it out. But I was proud of myself for having the gumption to try something like this. And all in all, it was another successful foodie project - successful as in it didn't catch fire or taste like shit.

Pinterest Project: Casserole Success

I have become addicted to Pinterest, like many others that I know, but for me it's mainly because I like seeing what other people are into. If I happen to find something of interest to me, that's just an added bonus. I embarked on a bit of a home improvement project a little over a month ago and took some ideas from Pinterest. Some turned out (invisible bookshelves), others did not (dyeing mason jars). Now I'm focusing on recipes. Cooking for one gets a little mundane, as I tired easily of eating chicken and vegetables five or six days out of the week.

Sunday night I took a 3-Meat Pizza Casserole recipe and adapted it a little bit. Here's the original recipe.

It supposedly turned out like this:

I did not use any meat aside from the pepperoni, and I also decided to forgo the vegetables as well. Not that I'm against vegetables. It's just that too much cheese, onions, and garlic together...let's just say it doesn't end well. So my "casserole" was more like baked pasta with pepperoni, but it is pretty delicious. Here's what mine turned out like:

I have eaten four meals out of this already, and still have probably two servings left. The only problem is that I have WAY more pepperoni than one person can ever need, so let's hope it's a while before that stuff goes bad, or I will be throwing like six bucks down the drain.

If anybody has any recipe suggestions, please send them my way. I'm currently trying to find something to do with an avocado, aside from just putting it in my salad.

Maybe they ought to charge an extra tax for clean water.

Here's a blog I wrote yesterday while I was at work:

I just finished reading this article about a proposed “fat tax”. (http://www.slate.com/id/2228713) Okay, I won’t lie. I didn’t read ALL of the article, but I did read most of it. Here’s what I think: I see the point about the tax. It could have its benefits as far as reducing the amount of soda drank by consumers in this country. But the last paragraph of the article really outlines the whole problem for me: the people that this tax will most affect are the ones who can’t afford healthy beverages and juices to replace soda in their diets, and while, yes, water is an extremely cheap option for most of us, I do not advise drinking water from the tap. Ever. Now, I do have a Brita water filter myself, one of those pitchers. I use tap water to fill it. But having lived in Campbellsville for the majority of my life with a subpar city water filtration system, I can say that the suggestion at the end of this article is more preposterous than the idea of calling a tax “fat tax”. (Click the “drink from the faucet” link there in the last paragraph. It’ll take you to a lengthy but informative NY Times article about disregard for the Clean Water Act.)

Campbellsville, per capita, probably has one of the highest cancer rates in the state, if not the nation. Breast cancer is incredibly common, and many young women my age and younger (self included) have had cysts on/in various parts of their reproductive systems. Many have had cysts so large on their ovaries that they could actually be considered tumors, and several of these women have had to have such growths removed more than once. Everyone knows that the problem is the city water, yet no one does anything about it. Growing up, we always drank bottled water. Even when we saw no negative effects from drinking the tap water, it still tasted disgusting. But there’s no way to stop using contaminated water completely. It would be far too expensive, not to mention inconvenient, to use bottled water for bathing as well. Then again, why should we have to? It’s just unbelievable how little gets done to protect basic human rights like the availability of clean water. (Let’s not get started on clean water in other countries. That’s a fight that we may never win.) I mean, did we learn nothing from the likes of Erin Brokovich and Karen Silkwood?

The other issue I had with the article was the fact that it was called a “fat tax”. How insulting is that to overweight people? At least the government isn’t suggesting we tax people for each pound they are overweight. So much for my fondness of WWII era America.

If it weren't for days like today, I'd go crazy.

I love my days off. I cherish them.

Today I was lazy and didn't really do anything until about four, when I finally decided to vacuum and do a little poop-scooping. I took a shower and headed off to Kroger to finish up some grocery shopping. I spent way more money than usual at Walmart this time, but I still needed meat and produce. When I got to Kroger and pulled a shopping cart out, I noticed there was something that I thought was a dark leaf in the cart. Just as I was getting ready to go around and get it out, I noticed it was moving. So I got around where I could see it and as it started to climb between the holes in the bottom of the cart, I saw that it was a tiny little bat. I started to move the cart around so I could go show the guy that was working at the door, but before I got all the way over there, the bat flew off, straight through the front doors. It was so cool.

I made orange chicken for dinner tonight, after much debate. But I'd been craving it and decided that now was as good a time as any to do it since I have plans for the next few days after work and wouldn't have time. I'm so glad I made it because it was fantastic. I have never been so pleased with something I cooked before. Of course, it was a little kit that I bought. It's not like I made the coating for the chicken or the orange sauce from scratch, but the whole thing still went really well. I wish I didn't have to save some of that for lunch at work tomorrow, because I wanted to finish it all!

I'm sitting here watching the Stevie Nicks Soundstage DVD. I know I say this often, but I want to make babies with that woman. Now I'm going to sit back and listen to "Sara".

Somebody read my MFing blog!

I just saw an ad online that said, "A diet is fine until you get hungry." That pretty much sums up my diet experience of the past week.

The plan originally was to do a juice fast, but I knew I couldn't go from 1800+ calories a day to subsisiting only on juice. I thought I'd cut down on food while gradually adding more fruit and vegetable juices into my diet, then hopefully by the end of a week do a two or three day juice fast as sort of a cleanse exercise. I was doing pretty well until yesterday, when I actually got hungry. Five days. Arg! Anyway, now there's no stopping me. I'm back to getting headaches when I go too long without eating and the dull hum that I felt in my stomach while doing bananas, smoothies, and tuna as a diet has now increased to a mild roar. Like a Simba roar. You're familiar with The Lion King, don't deny it.

Thanks to a trustworthy source (Mister D), this afternoon I found out about a book that I think could work for me. It's called Food Matters by Mark Bittman. He's also written a few other cookbooks, like How to Cook Everything. I looked for it at Waldenbooks at the mall earlier but had no luck. (That would have worked out well for me though. I still had a $30 gift card to spend and would have loved to have used it there. It was just a general gift card to the mall itself, so I went to FYE instead. Got a B-52s CD, Death Becomes Her - which I still only had on VHS - and a Dancing With the Stars Latin dance workout DVD. Part of my whole weight loss goal for this month.) I'll look for the Bittman book at Joseph-Beth after work tomorrow, although I can't buy it until after I get paid again. One thing that I know I can do to help my diet, though, is start buying whole wheat pastas and breads instead of what I buy now. Apparently quinoa is a great grain to incorporate into your diet, but I've only had it once and wasn't impressed by it. Then again I don't like plain noodles without sauce either. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Now I'm off to make some spaghetti. (What?! It's been four hours since I've eaten!) After that I still have time to do the Dancing With the Stars thing. I can't believe it's only 7:00. This has been a long fucking day.