The Blank Plate

State of Relaxation
It is true that I spend much of my time cooking. I love cooking.  I often spend hours in the kitchen banging pots and pans around. But even though I love cooking, there is nothing quite as comforting to coming home to dinner already done.  And even better, Gil, Jose and Salvador all get to share this feeling with me. We all collectively can relax over a couple bottles of beer because we know dinner is done.  The weight of the stress from our days is lifted as we sink into the couch and laugh over Family Guy.  There is calmness.  It is a state of relaxation that sometimes we cannot achieve on weekends or vacation.


Achieving Nirvana

How does one achieve this miraculous state of relaxation? Well it is good part thanks to a little kitchen appliance called the slow cooker and colloquially known as the crock pot (not to plug any brands, this blog is neutral).    See, the slow cooker allows you to assemble dinner in the morning before you leave for work.  You simply put things in, cover with liquid, plug into the wall and turn it on.  Usually this takes me 10 minutes tops.

The Magical Fruit

Now you can vary this with all kinds of soups, but in our household, the crock pot is used to make variations on one particular ingredient.  Yes you guessed it, beans! Having all grown up on Mexican food, we can eat beans every day.  And with plenty of protein and fiber, beans are a great sustenance to boot! They come in a wide variety and can be served plain or with almost any vegetable you can think of.  Greens has become a favorite because their heartiness holds up to the beans well and they often cheaply come in bags pre-chopped and pre-washed.



Recipes after the Jump

This week, I am honored to be a featured user of cork'd.  I find their site a really easy way to share and review wine. For instance, Friday, I went to a wine party hosted by my professor, and now all the reviews from the party are up.  The party's theme was unusual whites, and tasted Torrontes, Albarinos, Viognier, Grenache Blac, Gros Manseng and Grillo.  The latter three wines were completely new to me.  The winner of the night and my personal favorite was Domaine des Cassagnoles 2008 Gros Mensang. As I say in my review, this wine had it all!  If you have a chance, you should seek it out, it was definitely a memorable wine.  If not, then you should try a new white wine varietal.  White wine is very versatile and just because the weather is colder doesn't mean we should give it up.  There are many varieties of white wine with more body and depth than your average cheap pinot grigio. In addition, your more likely to find value in a lesser known varietal than the better marketed classics.  So glasses up for luscious white wines warming us up on cool fall evenings.   Please let me know what white wines you are enjoying this week!
Recipes after the Jump

One of things I find unique to food blogging, unlike a cooking show or a cookbook is the ability to expose the process in which we find ourselves making dinner. While cooking shows and cookbooks are very good at explaining technique and providing recipes, they don't really answer the question of how you end up with making that particular dish. The focus is on the final product. Thus they focus on the final steps of cooking. However, anyone who's tried to feed a family on a budget knows there's more to it.

Food blogging has allowed me space to talk about meal plan and execution, going grocery shopping and my complicated relationship with recipes. This underbelly of home cooking gets uncovered and the real process of cooking is discovered. And when the process is the focal of cooking, new discoveries are made.

In the picture above is pasta with mole poblano. Several weeks ago (you may remember from my grocery post) we made mole with potatoes and eggplant. However, we made way too much sauce. I had no ideas on what to do with it until Gil said "Make Pasta!". At first, I was skeptical. Logically, I thought, it couldn't be that bad, as pasta goes with anything, however, it was out of my range of usual pasta sauces. But I let Gil cook his vision and we had a delicious dinner that would never occurred had we been tied to our cookbooks.



Mole Poblano

• 1 little can of tomato paste
• 1 ounce of chocolate
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 onion
• 4 chile de arbols
• 1 chile ancho
• TSP cinnamon and nutmeg

1. Boil dry chiles in 3 cups of water
2. Saute onions and garlic
3. Blend chiles with water with tomato paste
4. Put sauce in sauce pan on medium low heat with garlic and onions
5. Melt chocolate in microwave
6. Stir chocolate in sauce with cinnamon and nutmeg
7. Salt and Pepper to taste
8. Let simmer until consistency of a thick sauce
   

Recipes after the Jump

More Frequent Drink Posts
I have decided that I want to posts about drinks more often. Drinks are an essential part of our diet and I think they are often overlooked. And I'm not just talking about alcoholic drinks. I realized that drink a variety of beverages and that they complement my meals and moods. I have featured various drinks in the past, such as a Pineapple Martini and Pinotage,and now I am making a decided effort to include drinks as part of my blog posts.

Tea Time
That said the drink of this week is tea. The weather is getting crisper these days and I crave a warm drink in the afternoons. For years, I drank coffee in the afternoon. Let me correct that, for years I drank coffee day and night. I was a coffee junkie; still am to some degree. But I am trying to cut back and only drink coffee in the morning. So the drink of choice on a chilly afternoon has been tea; all kinds of tea. Last night I had pomegranate white tea, and I ordered English Breakfast from Brew HaHa last week and I sipped Jasmin tea at a Vietnamese restaurant before that. Tea has really hit the spot for me this week because of the varieties it comes in and it warms up on these fall days.







Recipes after the Jump

A recipe from an surprising source
When I was in California, my Dad took me to Oto's, a Japanese grocery store he frequents. Outside there was a big bin filled with Kabocha Squash. Having never cooked with Kabocha, much less a Japanese recipe, my Dad asked a little old Japanese lady who was carefully selecting her Kabocha how she intended to fix hers. The lady gave us a very simple recipe. Boil the squash in water, toss in soy sauce and sugar. So we put our Kabocha in our cart and proceeded.

How I diet
I never got to cook that squash, I went home before it was eaten, but the recipe stuck with me. It is squash season and I am looking for ways to incorporate different kinds of squash in my diet. But I am not only looking for ways to incorporate squash into my diet because it is the freshest and cheapest now, but because this is how I diet.

Much like my last post on groceries, where I said it really depends on how you do the math, the same applies to diets. A friend recently just went on a no-carb diet. I saw him buy a salad and leave all the corn kernels at the bottom because corn is considered a carbohydrate. He is also eliminating fruit in addition to the classics such as bread and rice. Intuitively, this seems like a bad idea. Fruit is good for you. This is the wrong kind of calculating your relative nutritional needs because the focus is on eliminating whatever your diet presumes as evil.

Accentuating the Positive
Instead, I try to focus on food that is good for me. And I try to find ways to eat more it. Currently, since it is in season, I am trying to eat more squash. Squash is rich in beta carotene, with iron, vitamin C, potassium, and smaller traces of calcium, folic acid, and minute amounts of B vitamins. Upon arriving back in MD, I bought an acorn squash, boiled it and tossed it with tamari, honey and some green onions. I also made udon noodles with green peppers and edamame.

Sure, I eat carbohydrates. But in moderation. I also eat chocolate and cheese and I drink an alcoholic beverage almost every night. There is nothing I try to eliminate from my diet. Instead, I focus on things I want to eat because they are good for me and delicious. The meal I made ended up being, low in fat, calories, cholesterol, and probably carbohydrates. Whatever evil you want to pick on. But I arrived naturally at eating a meal low in nutritional devoid food by concentrating on eating food that is nutrient rich.

Disclaimer
One more thing. Please realize I am not picking a single nutrient I want, and finding ways to incorporate it. Don't pick out fiber and then buy a bunch of cereal bars with added fiber and call it a day. I know many people who also do this and I think it encourages people to eat more processed food and misses the point that nutrients work together. Instead I advocate, picking particular plant matter, vegetables, nuts, spices, herbs etc and deciding that you should eat more and find ways to do it.

Easy way to diet
My dad's simple action in asking the lady how she prepared squash made me realize how easy it was to add something new to your diet. Its as easy as that to eat more fruits and vegetables and less evil food.


Acorn Squash Faux Japanese Style
This is a sweet and salty recipe that complements the natural sweetness of the squash

• One Acorn Squash
• 1 cup Tamari
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1/2 cup green onions chopped

1. Cube Acorn Sqush into 2 inch square pieces
2. Boil until tender (approx 30 minutes)
3. Whisk Tamari and honey together
4. Chop green onions
5. Toss everything together

Udon Noodles with Green Peppers and Edamame

• One package Udon Noodles
• One green pepper
• 1 cup edamame beans already shelled
• 1 cup Tamari (or Soy Sauce)
• 2-3 TBS Rice Vinagre
• 1 TPS Sesame Oil

1. Boil udon noodles much like pasta.
2. Slice green pepper
3. Add pepper and edamame to noodles
4. Add liquid ingredients to noodles and toss

Recipes after the Jump

What you see here is my groceries for the week. Now, many people have different ways of calculating how expensive or cheap their groceries were. One way is to look at the percentage that your cashiers circle at the bottom of your receipt. I think this trip it was 2%. I never have many "savings", because well when was the last time sweet potatoes were on sale? Another way of doing it is thinking about the relative worth of an item. Sweet potatoes at .99 cents are fairly cheap for a vegetable. You get a lot of food for little money. More bang for your buck.

And while I think it is good to buy things on sale, and its good to buy cheaper items, I think there is one way to do grocery math that people often overlook. As you can see, not all of my items are cheap or on sale. I paid $5 for unbleached white flour and another $5 for organic vegetable broth (the only one I could find without additives). However, my bill total, even with expensive items and no sale items was $60. This will feed a family of four for a week. Here are the meals I planned for this week with ingredients bought.

1. Eggplant and Potato Mole Poblano

• Eggplant
• Potatoes
• Tomato Paste
  
• I already had spices and chocolate
  

1. Broccoli and Cheddar Soup with Spinach Salad

• Broccoli
• Cheddar
• Vegetable Broth
• Cream
• Spinach
• Pomegranate
• Oranges
  

1. Meatloaf with Sweet Potato Fries

• Ground Beef
• Sweet Potatoes
• Eggs
• Already had garlic and onions
  

1. Acorn Squash and Udon Noodles

• Acorn Squash
• Already had noodles, bell pepper, carrots, soy sauce and honey

Furthermore, I bought items for other meals. I make bread for the boys to eat in the morning, hence, the flour. The oranges and pomegranate double as the week's fruit. I bought milk and an impulse buy on the pureed pumpkin in case I felt an urge to make pie. I think its also important to note that Tuesday's dinner included 3 guests. I bought extra broccoli to make an extra big pot of soup.

So now, with 2% savings, no coupon clipping and expensive organic items I still manage to serve four meals to four people plus a dinner party and have a few extra items for $60. Lets say that roughly $4 a meal ($60 divided by four and then four again). Now, compared to eating Chinese take-out, ordering pizza or going to MacDonalds, I would say the cost of groceries is cheap.

People complain that groceries are expensive, and particularly vegetables are expensive. I think they are just not doing the right math. I think if you rely too much on the other more popular measures, you will sucked into thinking that your better off eating out. Maybe I am going out on a limb here but all those "savings" and coupons are just a gigantic marketing ploy, and really your better off ignoring it. I'm not saying, buy all organic or all specialty items, just splurge on the ones you feel are worth the money. For me, I will splurge if I can avoid additives in my food. But its a personal choice for each of us. But I want to make the point that it can be done and it will still be cheaper than eating out. It just depends on how your calculating the price of your groceries.


Recipes after the Jump

Ok ok, its not pie, but very similar in concept. Quiche has a pie crust and a filling. But is either pie or quiche easy? And by easy I mean, Rachel-Ray-can-make-in 30-minutes easy. Well, it can be. The trick is, having the crust pre-made. I originally made pie dough for bean empanadas, and I froze the leftover. I originally thought I would just make well, pie, out of it but why limit myself to that? So I got the idea to make quiche. I rolled and and blind baked the crust in the morning before work (really only took 10 minutes). And then in the evening all I had to do was beat the eggs, chop the veggies and pour it in and drink wine for a half an hour.

Before this experience, I thought that quiche was really something only to make for special occasions, like brunch. But, I am slowly beginning to realize that by squeezing in little bits of prep work, complicated fussy dishes can be made in a snap for dinner time. Moreover, I have begun to realize that many things that look difficult to make are accessible to the home cook. Remember I had mentioned that blackberry wine? Well, we made it, and it turned out delicious! If you keep your mind open and don't dismiss things that look to complex, you can figure out how to break the process down and make it possible to make!




Pie Dough without a food processor

• 3 cups of flour
• 1 stick of butter frozen
  
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 cups water

1. In a bowl mix flour and salt.
2. Using a cheese grater, grate the butter into the flour.
3. Add water a teaspoon or two at a time and mix until the dough comes together into a bowl, error on the dry side, you cannot add more flour.

Quiche
I didn't have cream on hand, so I substituted with sour cream and milk.

• Pie Crust
  
• 5 eggs
• 1/2 cup of Milk
• 1/2 cup of sour cream
• 3 cloves of garlic
• Your choice of veggies, we chose mushrooms and green onion
• Parmesan (optional)
• Salt and Pepper

1. I blind baked the pie dough in the morning to ensure it wouldn't be soggy, this step might not be necessary.
2. Preheat oven to 350 F
   
3. Beat eggs and mix in milk and cream.
4. Add in veggies and garlic.
5. Add in salt and pepper.
6. Pour in pie crust and place in oven.
7. Drink wine for half an hour.

Recipes after the Jump