Odds and Ends

Some interesting things have been going on at our little apartment. Probably the most exciting development (for me) is that I got a yogurt maker! It's amazing. Making yogurt is so easy and so...cheap. I love yogurt so much but I don't want to pay $2.00 a cup for some deliciously thick Fage. So now I can make it on my own! For, like, $2.00 a quart.

Yum, delicious yogurt. We've also started checking Ina Garten books from the public library out like crazy, mostly in an attempt to be her/Deb from Smitten Kitchen.

We've been getting cabbage so often in our CSA box, and here's a beautiful (blurry) specimen. Most of the cabbage has been turned into weird slaws, such as a Sriracha slaw with squash and sweet peppers that I made yesterday. Hm. I also threw the cabbage into my stock bag, and it turned my last batch of stock purple. More on stock bags probably in the next few days, because I'm due to make a new batch.

We made hamburger buns and lentil burgers. God, they were heavenly. It was a Recipezaar recipe, this one here.

K and I never buy granola. There's no point, when making it is so freaking delicious and so much less expensive. Plus you can put what you want in it rather than some corporation. We like ours really simple--oats and coconut, and K has chocolate chips after it's cooled a little. Here's the recipe.

Granola for Two
3 cups oats, preferably really thick--we use Bob's Red Mill
3 tbsp oil--either vegetable oil or butter; we've used both. Butter makes it crispier
3 tbsp honey and/or corn syrup--to your taste. Last time I threw in the last little bit of brown sugar we had too.
Whatever you want to mix in.

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees. Heat honey with oil until it's liquid. Pour over oats and whatever you want to mix in--nuts are good, as well as coconut, anything you want to toast (probably not dried fruit yet). Pam a baking sheet and spread out the granola on the sheet. Pop it in the oven and do the dishes. Ten minutes later, stir the granola, spreading it back out. Bake for another ten minutes or so, until it's golden. Take it out and let it cool. Put in the other goodies that you didn't want to bake.

wine slush

K and I have a lot of wine. Trouble is, we open a bottle and then we never drink the other half, because we don't drink a whole lot and wine is always stronger than I think it will be. So yesterday I poured our latest bottle of red wine in an ice cube tray, thinking that it would be good for deglazing a pan later. I discovered this morning that the wine didn't freeze in elegant cubes; instead, it was slushy, giving to the touch.

So we made wine slush! It was delicious, so much so that I didn't take a picture of it (I was also cooking zucchini at the time).

Wine Slush
Leftover wine, about half a bottle or however much you want to drink
1 lemon for every half bottle of wine
we used 3 tbsp of sugar for this much wine, adjust to your taste

Freeze the wine in ice cube trays overnight or in the morning in time for dinner. Later, juice the lemons in a bowl (we have a nice tall one with a lip for pouring). Add the sugar, and then put your wine ice cubes in. Mush it with a spoon, and taste. Add more sugar if you want. We let it melt a bit so that it was drinkable.

This would be good as sangria, too, if you have apples and melons and orange juice and a liquor cabinet. Which, you know, we don't.

a simple dinner

Today K is at a meeting so I made dinner by myself. I made Mark Bittman's braised carrots with Balsamic and stock, and a little crispy chickpea salad with some goat cheese.

Glazed/Braised Carrots
for one
3 carrots
enough stock to cover them in a pan
1 tbsp or so of butter (or a vegan oil)
a shot of Balsamic vinegar
a lemon half

Peel the carrots and cut them up. Put them in a pot. Pour in your stock and Balsamic vinegar and butter. Turn it on medium high until they boil a bit. Turn it down to low or medium-low and let it sit, stirring lazily, until the liquids cook down and get glossy. Mark says to cover them but I didn't. The carrots should be tender. It should take about 30 min. Squeeze a little lemon juice on top, if you want.

Crispy Chickpea Salad
Arugula or some other greens
1/2 (handful) of chickpeas
Butter
Olive Oil
1 tsp minced garlic
goat cheese
a pinch of flour

Mash up the chickpeas in a bowl. Add the garlic. Heat half of the butter (1/2 a pat or so) and some olive oil in the pan. Add the smushed chickpeas, and compress them in a central region of the pan. Sprinkle flour on top--it will make them crispier when you turn them over. Fry until dark brown. Turn over. Add the rest of your oils, making sure they get all throughout the chickpeas. While you wait for that to cook put your arugula on a plate and get the goat cheese out. Slide the chickpeas on to the arugula. Crumble the cheese on top. Do it while the chickpeas are nice and hot; the cheese will get melty and the arugula will wilt a little.

catching you up on sweets

MMM, rhubarb bars

This is the cake that K made me for my birthday. It's a 1-2-3-4 Cake by good old Martha Stewart. It's strange, lately I have been turning to Martha at the oddest moments. I Abebook-ed her name and there were like three thousand holiday cookbooks.

Oh, and I must mention that K used her mom's secret recipe for lemon curd, so we can't share it.

MIGHTY CONE and un-delicious graphjam

Sometimes I hate GraphJam. They do have funny graphs maybe once a week but usually they're just sexist or stupid stuff like this.

Whatever, I love home-cooked food, whether my mom makes it or my grandma or K.

And I hate ramen.

On another good note--TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY! and I'll be eating the cake that K is making for me right now as well as MIGHTY CONE again tonight and margaritas. If you live in Austin and you haven't been to Mighty Cone! then you are missing out, my friend. The breading itself on the avocado/chicken/shrimp is worth recreating (as the website says, "it's sesame seeds, almonds, arbol chile flakes, sea salt, sugar, and corn flakes"), which will be a summer project you will be privy to, dear readers.

Happy Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day as well as my first day back at the Children's Museum. Neither K nor I are mothers but I love this day very much, in part because my birthday is around the same time as Mother's Day and some years they would correspond. Those years my grandparents would take us out to Olive Garden and I would get birthday cheese ravioli.

Since I was at work, K was the chef tonight. She made these delicious bars based on a recipe from Smitten Kitchen; instead of raspberry delightfulness, she used the frozen rhubarb we had. They are delicious and I could eat them for dessert or breakfast any day. I took a picture but I'll put it up later.

Rhubarb Bars

Crust:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 1/4 cups oats
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup butter

Filling:
1 lb frozen rhubarb (fresh would be fine too, double points for it being in season)
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
2 tbsp melted butter
a little salt

She cooked it at 350f in a glass 9x13 pan. Deb from SK recommends parchment paper, and I think it's a good idea too. Pulse all the dry stuff for the crust in a food processor, and then add your crust butter. Save about 1 1/2 cups and press the rest into the pan. K baked this first part of the crust for 15 min, and then let it cool while she made the filling.

K thawed the rhubarb and then strained the liquid. She mixed it up with the other stuff and let it all sit together. Then she spread it on the crust in the pan. After that, she put the reserved crust on top. Pop that in the oven for about 35 minutes or so.

Ours are a little different in consistency than Deb's; they are crumblier and less crispy, but coming after our last summer of rhubarb crumble after rhubarb crumble they are delicious.

She says she'd like to try them again with more fruit filling and less butter. We'll keep you posted.

We also ate delicious tacos for dinner--just plain old reheated pinto beans and HEB cheese and El Milagro tortillas--we found the flour version at Farm to Table on South Congress, which is disappointing because we'd really like to be able to get them at HEB. The yellow corn versions are at Central Market and only Central Market, which is equally disappointing. El Milagro tortillas and totopos are our absolute favorite out of the tortilla brands available in Austin.

yogurt flop

I made yogurt this weekend. Really, making your own yogurt is easy; it's just that you have to keep it at a steady temperature for 7 or so hours. I thought everything went really well--except that it got a little too hot at one point. I think that might have been what made it so grainy.

It's a little too grainy to eat on its own but I think it's fine for mixing with cereal, making smoothies, and making yogurt cake and frozen yogurt. We'll have to see.

I really want to make this yogurt cake, especially with some rhubarb jam.