yuuummy summer salad

Despite the fact that there are only 3 warm months out of the whole year here in Moscow, there are many things I missed about this place while we were in Virginia Beach. Sidewalks. Local coffeeshops. No traffic. But maybe MOST OF ALL is the Moscow Food Coop. Part natural grocery store, part awesomest lunch spot ever, I have so many food obsessions to come out of there. Tabouli....Veggie pockets....tomato tortellini soup.

But perhaps my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE is their Bok Choy salad.

What is so awesome about this recipe is all the fresh CRUNCH. Check out all the PEPPERS and CABBAGE!!! cruchcrunchcrunch!

You can get this recipe, and the whole Coop Cookbook on their website, but just to do the homework for you, here you go!


Salad:

1/2 C. almonds, slivered and toasted
1 head Bok Choy, chopped
1 C. red cabbage, chopped
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 1/2 T. tamari (or soy sauce)
3/4 C. vegan mayonnaise (I substituted plain yogurt)

Dressing: (this is where the magic happens)

1/4 C. apple cider vinegar
1/4 C. tamari
1/4 C. canola oil
1/4 C. brown sugar.

Chop everything, toss it all in a bowl. Whisk the dressing together, pour over the salad, and toss it up! Hope you love it!

Baked Bree Baked Oatmeal

My sister Julie just got married and she is already super-wife. Not only does she pack Nathan lunch every single day, but she also makes him breakfast every single day. When Ellis heard that, he was like, "What?! some wives do that for their husbands?" Soooo....I'm working on trying to be a breakfast-making, lunch-packing wife for him this summer!

The main issue is that I'm a really awful morning person, so it's all I can do to rouse into half-consciousness and give Ellis a kiss goodbye. I seriously think if I trained myself to get up at 6 every day, half of my life problems would be solved. All that is to say that I'm on the lookout for breakfasts that you can make once and then have a bunch of leftovers that actually stay good and reheat.

As is probably obvious, I'm kind of on a food blog SPREE, so I tried Baked Bree's Healthy Baked Oatmeal this morning. Delicious and SO easy!

Here's the pic from Baked Bree--we can just pretend mine was this pretty! ;)

Here we go:

2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup toasted and chopped walnut pieces
1/3 cup natural cane sugar or maple syrup (and more syrup for serving)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
2 cups milk
1 egg
3 Tablespoons butter melted and cooled slightly
2 teaspoon vanilla
2 bananas
1 1/2 cups blackberries (blueberries, raspberries, or a mixture)

Mix your dry ingredients (only half the walnuts though), then mix your wet ingredients. Chop fruit if needed and lay bananas and half of berries out on bottom. Then add dry ingredients, then wet on top, and stir to incorporate. Sprinkle the rest of your fruit and walnuts on top and bake at 375 for 35-45 min.

Changes I made: trying to make it more WeightWatchers friendly for my mom and a friend, I only used 2 T of butter and only sprinkled walnuts on half of the top, so their pieces didn't have all the extra nuts. Also, it turned out plenty sweet, so you could easily reduce the sugar and add more berries. The berry bites were my fav and next time I'll add more berries than Bree calls for!

AND the best part is that now I have slabs of baked oatmeal ready to go for Ellis' breakfasts so I can be superwife like Julie!

Oh oh! BONUS: Brody likes it! he's so picky right now that I can't count on him to eat anything, but he gobbled it up!

I would like to soak the oatmeal first, but I was paranoid about it making the baked oatmeal all mushy. Any tips?

must eat this pizza!

Since I don't have a house or apartment to work on this summer, I'm pretty obsessed with trying new foods and focusing more energy on that. Also, since we're eating 3 dinners a week with my parents, that helps out with the grocery budget and means I can let myself buy some more interesting ingredients for the meals that I am making!

This domestic restlessness yesterday prompted me to abandon my normal stand-by pizza dough recipe and try out the one on Smitten Kitchen, one of my new favorite cooking blogs. But......no offense to my old quickie pizza dough......it was the best decision EVER! This pizza took longer to make than my old recipe--about 1 hr and 45 minutes from start to finish rather than less than an hour, but it was completely worth it!


Here are her instructions with my modifications in italics:

Smitten Kitchen's Really Simple Pizza Dough

Makes enough for one small, thin crust pizza. Double it if you like your pizza thick and bready. I was nervous about the pizza being too thin and wimpy, so I quadrupled the recipe to make 2 big pizzas and 1 more ball of dough in the freezer. It was so thick and filling that Julie, Nathan, Ellis, Brody and I only ate one pizza between us all, and now Ellis has a whole pizza for lunches the rest of the week. So I think that she is a bit conservative about the portions. One recipe I think would make a perfectly sized, medium crust pizza!

1 1/2 cups flour (can replace up to half of this with whole wheat flour)
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water (may need up to 1 or 2 tablespoons more)
1 tablespoon olive oil

1 teaspoon sugar (sorry about that random space--it won't let me get rid of it!)

Stir dry ingredients, including yeast, in a large bowl. Add water and olive oil, stirring mixture into as close to a ball as you can. I tasted it at this point, and thought it was a little salty so added the sugar in. Dump all clumps and floury bits onto a lightly floured surface and knead everything into a homogeneous ball.

If you are finding this step difficult, one of the best tricks I picked up from my bread-making class is to simply pause. Leave the dough in a lightly-floured spot, put the empty bowl upside-down on top of it and come back in 2 to 5 minutes, at which point you will find the dough a lot more lovable.

Knead it for just a minute or two. Lightly oil the bowl (a spritz of cooking spray perfectly does the trick) where you had mixed it — one-bowl recipe! — dump the dough in, turn it over so all sides are coated, cover it in plastic wrap and leave it undisturbed for an hour or two, until it has doubled in size. I preheated the oven and let it rise in there, and it had doubled in an hour.

Dump it back on the floured counter (yup, I leave mine messy), and gently press the air out of the dough with the palm of your hands. Fold the piece into an approximate ball shape, and let it sit under that plastic wrap for 20 more minutes.

Sprinkle a pizza stone or baking sheet with cornmeal and preheat your oven to its top temperature. Roll out the pizza, toss on whatever topping and seasonings you like. (I always err on the side of skimpy with toppings so to not weight down the dough too much, or if I have multiple toppings, to keep them very thinly sliced.)

Bake it for about 10 minutes until it’s lightly blistered and impossible to resist.

Our dough puffed up beautifully, but wasn't the least bit doughy. LOVED it!!

getting the ink flowing again!

When March 31 rolled around, I had these delusions of grandeur in which I posted like 4-5 times a week in April! But somehow in the midst of packing boxes and trying to creatively plan how not to waste the food in the pantry and squeezing in all the remaining time with friends here, my inspiration has RUN.DRYY.

So anyway, gonna try to get back on track here! Ellis and I LOVE Asian. SERIOUSLY, Chinese, Thai, Indian....we could eat Asian or Mexican every night of the week! Usually Ellis loves to cook Asian for me so I can kick up my feet and relax (another reason I love to eat it so much!), but on the night of Ellis' final class of law school, I set out on a mission to find the perfect peanut sauce recipe.

So of course the first stop was Allrecipes, for all the great reviews and suggestions. I searched and came up with this amazing honey peanut sauce. It uses equal parts honey and peanut butter, has a great consistency, and tastes completely INCREDIBLE.

• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/4 cup smooth peanut butter
• 1 tablespoon crunchy peanut butter (optional)
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 2 teaspoons minced fresh garlic
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger root
• 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

The recipe calls to just mix all the ingredients in a small bowl, but I heated them on the stove to make a warm sauce for Asian noodles and veggies, and I made a couple other small changes to the recipe. I didn't add QUITE as much honey as peanut butter (it just seemed like a LOT), I cut the rice vinegar in half, and I cheated with powdered ginger and garlic cause I didn't have the real stuff. (Well, I had real garlic but didn't feel like mincing :) ) Finally, I added siracha sauce for heat.Haha, it totally looks like slop, but I promise it was delicious! Anyone have tips on how to photograph peanut stir fry and NOT have it look like slop?

Baked Bree Valentine's

This Valentine's Day was pretty much all about food....it was up there with Christmas with tempting treats and candy. I'd never thought about Valentine's Day that way before, so I'm not sure if this year was more food-centered in and of itself or if I'm just way more into food than ever before (I can't believe I used to be a picky eater!).

But at any rate, all day we feasted on recipes from my new favorite food blog, Baked Bree!We started on Sunday with her AMAZING peanut butter cookies! I'm so excited to now have a go-to peanut butter cookie recipe...the best part is that she adds butterscotch and chocolate chips!

I'm not generally a fan of sugar cookies, but these were just so PRETTY. So I just made them and didn't eat any. And I learned a valuable lesson about icing--you can't just wing it with a Ziploc bag and a random icing tip or you will end up with a HUGE mess all over your kitchen.

Ellis and I are HUGE Asian food fans....Thai, Chinese, Malaysian, Indian...anything we can get our hands on! So we had to try Bree's Indian Butter chicken.

I have to admit I TOTALLY cheated on this. The recipe calls for garam masala, which I couldn't find at the grocery store, so I totally just grabbed Trader Joe's premade Masala Simmering Sauce and added some additional ginger, garlic, and onion. Regardless of the cheating, Ellis LOVED it and I did too--I think this is gonna be one of those recipes like Soy Chicken that makes it into the menu cycle every 2 weeks! Hope you enjoy Baked Bree as much as we are!

{all photos from Baked Bree}

mmmm...Easy Peasy Pizza Dough

So last month my thing was photos and I guess this month it's food! I totally hate posting without pictures cause I always assume posts without pictures are boring, but my whole memory card is FULL of pics from Christmas and so I am just too intimidated by the prospect of sorting through 600 photos to put them on the computer. So this will just have to be a boring picture-less post and then I will hopefully get all my pics uploaded tomorrow. (And by tomorrow I mean actual tomorrow and not the generic "tomorrow" of a procrastinator, even though that is what I am. :( )

Anyway, another go-to meal at our house is homemade pizza! Every Friday night we make pizza with whatever toppings we want (always peppers, mushrooms, and pepperoni!) and either have a nice quiet date night to recover from a long week, or have friends over for a pizza party!

I've been using the same dough recipe from my friend Kate for 3 years, and it is super fabulous, foolproof, and QUICK!

Kate's Pizza Dough
2 1/4 tsp. yeast, dissolved in 1 C. lukewarm water (I normally make it a heaping 2 1/4 tsp--I figure a little extra yeast never hurts!)
2 T. olive oil
2 1/2 C. flour (I usually do 1 C. wheat and 1 1/2 C. all-purpose)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 T. sugar

Dissolve the yeast in water and let stand a few minutes. Meanwhile mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a big mixing bowl. Pour in the yeast mixture and mix with the flour, then add the olive oil at the end to keep it from getting too sticky. Spray top with Pam, cover with a towel, and let rise in a warm place for half an hour plus. (I usually just do half an hour and it's fine.)

After 30 minutes, separate into two balls and turn out on floured surface. Roll out with a rolling pin or just mash with your hands (that's what I do most of the time :) ), and put each pizza on a stone or just a cookie sheet. Brush crust with olive oil and bake at 425 degrees for 5-10 minutes.

Add sauce and toppings and cook until the cheese bubbles.

Each batch makes 2 pizzas. Hope you like it!

Garlic Chicken

Wow, I almost feel like a shy stranger here, it's been so long! My grandfather passed away the second week of December, and so Ellis, Brody, and I drove down for the funeral and then Christmas with my grandmother and my family. So aside from being busy with family events, the internet is not welcome in Grandmama's house. Not only did she not have it, the fact that everyone else did annoyed her. (I'm using the past tense because my dad and aunt have forced it on her in the last couple weeks. :) ) So we spent a nice, old-fashioned Christmas with hardly any technology!

Oh, and my power cord broke. And I JUST got the new one in the mail!! SO exciting! The limited internet has been a great cleanse, but I'm ready to have it back! yay!!

So for the first post of 2011, the most amazing chicken ever! This recipe was given to me by my friend Whitney, and it is to die for! (Any time you see a recipe came from Whitney, you will know it is good!!) I'm sure it's terrible for you, but you will know what I mean when I say who cares? Normally chocolate trumps everything for me, but I would seriously choose this chicken over dessert any day!

Here we go:

Garlic Chicken

Chicken breasts (the card from Whitney says "3-4 (or 5)"--so really, however many you need)
10 T. butter (mmmm)
1 garlic clove, crushed
3/4 C. Italian bread crumbs (or regular ones + Italian seasoning)
1/2 C. parmesan cheese
Salt and pep
Lemon juice
Paprika


Melt butter in baking dish with the minced garlic clove. Combine bread crumbs, parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper. Lay chicken breasts in baking dish and sprinkle with bread crumb mixture. Sprinkle some lemon juice and paprika on and bake till it's done. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!!

Dec 6--Baking Bread with Londyn

December Photo Project, 12/6: today Londyn and I made bread!

Grown Up Thanksgiving

This is Ellis' and my first Thanksgiving as "grown ups." As in the first time I've had to actually help in the planning and organization of the holiday. I've made part of the meal at home with my family, but now I see that it's not the cooking that is the work--it's the planning of the cooking. And the shopping. And actually, mostly the thing that feels grown up is the paying for the shopping. It's totally different to make macaroni pie when your mom buys all the cheese than when you buy all the cheese. ;)

We did an early Thanksgiving in DC with my aunt Tammi this last weekend (which was AWESOME and I will put up pics), and now we are going to do Thanksgiving Day with some friends from law school tomorrow. We are really missing our families out West, but it's kind of exciting to be doing Thanksgiving as adults for the first time!

Another thing that's different this year is instead of the typical sweet potato casserole, I'm gonna be making my aunt's amazing Squash Souffle recipe!

{image via Taste of Home}

Tammi made it on Sunday and it was delicious, and I thought it would be a fun twist on the usual menu. Maybe everyone else knows all about squash souffle on Thanksgiving already, but to me it was new and exciting! (Also, it circumvents any marshmallow v. brown sugar and pecan debates- which is good because Ellis loves marshmallows--all the time with everything, and I don't like marshmallows with anything at any time.)

So here is her recipe!

Tammi's Thanksgiving Squash Souffle

1 package frozen squash (12 oz, I think)
1 stick butter

Cook, in a saucepan over medium heat for approx. 20 minutes
(make sure the butter coats the pan so the squash doesn't burn and stick)

add 1/2 cup sugar, stir with whisk
add 1/2 cup flour, stir with whisk
add 3 eggs, 1 at a time, stir with whisk
add 2 cups milk, stir with whisk

dash of nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Cook at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Let sit for several hours. Reheat at 350 for 20 mins.

Maybe I should've waited till I actually made it to post the recipe, but even if mine turns out awful, my aunt's is amazing, so it's still a great recipe! Enjoy! Happy Thanksgiving!

11/28--Edited to Add: Super easy, and turned out yummy! Give it a try! :)

Maybe Baby Food

And because I've been at home all weekend, it's the perfect time to catch up a bit on this blog. :)

My amazing friend Shaye inspired me to make baby food this summer, so I gave it a try. So far I've just been doing this with fruits and veggies we had lying around (i.e. things that were about to go bad). We mostly plan on giving Brody blended up bits of whatever Ellis and I are eating (which is exactly what this is), but it will be great for times when we're out and about and don't have a blender. Also, it just seemed like a fun experiment.

Cooking it all up

In nice little baby-sized portions

Into the freezer!

I think I got such a thrill out of this because I am not naturally organized AT ALL, and have been working really hard since being married to become that way. And projects like this make me feel like I'm playing dress-up and being super organized like so many of my great mom friends!

We'll find out how edible this is in about 5 months or so!

Orzo with Kale

So I got some kale for free from the King's Pantry (one of the perks of living at the Regent Village--free food for the residents twice a week!). I'd never made kale before, so I hit up All Recipes to find a yummy way to use it up....and found this great Orzo with Kale recipe! It has some fun unusual flavors like tumeric and nutmeg (which gives it a nice fallish flair), and Ellis loved it! Enjoy!

Carrot Mint Soup

Brad and Sarah made this amazing soup for us in London, and it has become one of our new staple meals coming into fall! Ellis is normally not a big soup fan, but he and I both can't get enough of this!

Carrot Mint Soup

Onion (between 1 and 2)
Carrots (4-5 of the big ones-as opposed to the baby ones)
Chicken stock (4 Cups)
Fresh Mint
Salt and pepper

This is a pretty general recipe with the amounts, but basically melt some butter in a pot, toss in some chopped onion and carrots, and let them cook until tender. Then add the chicken stock, mint, salt, and pepper, and let simmer. Finally puree the soup and enjoy! :)