Vegetarian Spring Rolls

Tonight's dinner (not pictured) was a comedy of errors, without any of the redeeming comedic value. (Meat gone off, a burned sauce, boiling water spilled on my tummy...) I started my evening tired, hungry and not feeling that well, and now I've lost two hours, am still tired, still hungry, still don't feel well, AND I have a burned stomach. Plus a sink full of dishes to wash. Sigh.

I've not been updating to much this last while, which maybe means I'm getting tired of this and it's time to give up. Or maybe it means that I've not been happy with anything I've been making. Or maybe it doesn't mean much of anything. I don't know.

I think I've mentioned that I'd been feeling unwell for a while, well, I finally went to a doctor about it, but I'm not really convinced that his diagnosis really was the whole story. The medication I've been taking hasn't really been helping. I suppose I need to go see someone again, but I have a hard time going to clinics about things that feel wishy-washy to me - vague discomforts (I can't really call them pains, but they're so constant that it's worse than just a short sharp pain would be) to me don't lend themselves to visits to a clinic. They want Symptom A + Symptom B = Diagnosis X, leading to Treatment Y, and Patient Z out the door. I wish I could find a doctor taking new patients. Preferably not an old doctor, either, because that would be just my luck that I'd start seeing someone and s/he'd retire.

Anyway, these vague discomforts are mostly related to my stomach and the treatment I was given was Prevacid, so if I've got a problem with stomach acid, that means I should be more careful about what I'm eating. I've not felt inspired by food in a while.

Still, I finally got around to making spring rolls the other day. I don't know that I did a very good job - it seems like there should maybe be more filling so the rice wrapper isn't layered so thick and one of the spring rolls I made had a lot of tears in it by the time I got it on the plate. Still, these were really tasty - the vegetables are bright and fresh and came alive with garlic and cilantro and serrano pepper. It was really spicy (I should be avoiding that... didn't seem to bother me, though) but pretty spectacular tasting. I've got enough rice papers left to make spring rolls every day for the rest of eternity, so I'll definitely have to try it again.

A few days prior to the spring rolls, I made healthy meatloaf. This meatloaf probably had pretty equal amounts of meat and vegetables in it - finely diced mushrooms, onions, carrots, celery, and red pepper, as well as rolled oats.

It's not the most tasty looking thing, but it was really delicious, especially as leftovers with a bit of cheese melted over and a puddle of ketchup and mustard for dipping. I served it with mashed sweet potatoes, which I found tasty but too strange to want to eat often, and sautéed snap peas (delicious!) I've got most of the leftovers in the freezer, so I'll definitely be eating this again, and will probably make it again someday if I'm in the mood for comfort food.

Even though they're completely different meals, this sort of looks samey, doesn't it? I made this a few days prior to the meatloaf. It's just salmon in a very simple marinade of (mostly) orange juice and ginger, and the glaze was quite tasty, though most of it cooked away. I severely overcooked it though and didn't eat very much of the salmon because it was so dry.

And that's the backlog. Enjoyable, all. Shame I didn't get to eat any of them tonight, instead of my trashed stir-fry beef with snow peas and tomatoes...

Sausage and Sweet Potato Chili

This photo is several days old now and when I look at it, I think that June isn't really the time of year to be making chili. But when I made this, it snowed. SNOW. In June. I feel pretty strongly about the fact that it should not snow, in the northern hemisphere, in June. But my sister assures me that it snowed in July once, a few years back.

The thing about living in Calgary is that we have pretty wild weather, sometimes. Not wild in the sense of hurricanes and tornadoes, but if we get a Chinook at the right time in winter, it can go from -20 to +20 within hours. And sometimes it also snows when it should be summer. Sigh.

In any case, this was a very delicious dinner, which very much suited the weather, if not the season. It was sweet and savoury and warm and filling. The chili wasn't over-powering or under-whelming, just a nice compliment to the flavours of the chorizo sausage, sweet potatoes, kidney beans, and other spices. I'll definitely be making this again, but I hope not for another 6 months or so.

Chicken and Potato Caesar Salad

You know, this is not the most attractive picture, but it was pretty tasty. Even better on the second day, once the garlic had more of a chance to do its thing in the dressing.

Basically, this is what it says on the tin: a combination of potato salad and chicken Caesar salad. But lighter than either and a really great dish for lunch. Essentially it's boiled potatoes and cooked chicken breast, coated lightly with a (light) homemade Caesar dressing, topped with sliced green onions and chopped parsley, and served over baby romaine and other greens.

I was really impressed with the dressing, since most "light" Caesar dressings in my experience haven't really tasted that good, but this one was garlicy and delicious.

Thai Yellow Curry with Chicken

There is something intimidating to me about making curry paste. I'm not really sure what it is, but I never make my own curries. (I suppose I have made butter chicken from scratch in the past, as well as aloo gobi, but otherwise.) That cookbook I kept talking about in the last few entries, Jamie's Food Revolution has several not-entirely intimidating recipes for curry pastes, but... I don't know.

Anyway, I keep trying out different packets and jars of curry pastes and sauces, hoping to find something good, and this one was very good. I've gone and thrown away the package without paying very much attention to what company created it - maybe Asian Home Gourmet or Thai Kitchen or... I don't know. In any case, the suggested recipe called for sliced chicken, diced potatoes, and sliced carrots, so what's what I did.

I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to how much I was tossing in with my curry sauce, but I probably doubled up on the potatoes and carrots, so by the time everything was cooked, there wasn't an awful lot of sauce to go around. Nevertheless: delicious.

It was spicy enough to make my nose run, but didn't really feel hot on my tongue. Thoroughly enjoyable and probably something I'll make again, though next time I'll watch my proportions of vegetables.

Baked Chicken Kabobs with Quinoa Tabbouleh

I've had this window open for two days and can't seem to decide what to say. So here's the thing: I've been having stomach problems for quite a while and I, like anybody, hate going to the doctor. I couldn't hope to self-diagnose (and wouldn't bother trying - that's a good way to freak yourself out), but I decided to do an elimination diet for a bit and see if I feel any better while not eating some of the foods that often trigger people. And then I'll start adding things back and see if anything pops up.

I hadn't realized how difficult it is to cut things out. I mean, I don't like hot breakfasts, so cereal is usually my option. But I'm not eating dairy or wheat (for the first bit, then I'll start adding back) so that cuts out the cereal. (There are gluten free cereals, I know, but I don't like any of them that I've seen.) So I was looking up recipes for non-gluten grains, because obviously vegans manage without the dairy, but everything I find is still for hot grain breakfasts. I could get up and make myself a bowl of quinoa or amaranth with fruit and soy milk for breakfast. But I wouldn't enjoy it. So then toast would be my next breakfast option, but... wheat.

For breakfast this morning, I had an orange and a bowl of tabbouleh (made with quinoa, rather than gluten-containing bulgar) that was leftover from the dinner pictured here. It was a strange thing to have for breakfast, so much parsley and green onion and tomato. Tasty, but strange. I made a rice pilaf tonight which I refrigerated so that I can have that for breakfast the next couple days - just brown rice with a lot of vegetables in it.

In any case, this was the first elimination diet dinner. The recipes came from the book YOU on a Diet, which is not my favourite diet book out there. I find the tone kind of irritating, though I know they were trying to be playful about it, and at times I was bored by it and then the greatest disappointment: there weren't many recipes and I wasn't very attracted to many of them. I decided to try this chicken recipe because I mostly always like chicken and vegetables skewered together and cooked that way.

This particular version was a little dry for my tastes, though. You don't use any fat on kabob and no liquid marinade of any kind, so the fact that I left it an extra minute under the broiler made a pretty big difference. The chicken was tasty, but extremely dry. If you look at the bigger version of the picture, the mushrooms are all shrunken because they lost all their liquid but didn't have anything to reabsorb. They had a surprisingly great texture, though, for all their dried out skins.

The tabbouleh was a slight variation from their given recipe, since I used quinoa in place of the bulgar and left out the mint. (I didn't have any and didn't want to buy it just for this.) Here's the recipe I came up with, to serve 2-3:

1/3 cup quinoa, rinsed
1/2 cup water

1 tomato, diced
4 green onions, cut into thin rings
1 cup parsley, diced
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Bring the water to a boil, add quinoa and a bit of salt. Lower heat to low and cook 20 minutes or until water is absorbed. Remove from heat and let cool if you like.

Meanwhile, prepare the vegetables and toss in a bowl with parsley and the remaining ingredients. Stir in the finished quinoa, adjust seasonings to taste, and enjoy.

Mushroom and Oka Cheese Tatin

So I found Oka cheese at the grocery store a while ago and bought it on a whim and then went, 'Oh crap, what do I do with this?'

Oka is a cheese made in Oka, Quebec, a location I know more for the Oka Crisis in 1990 than for their cheese. But the long and short of it is this: Trappists monks at the monastery in Oka developed this cheese, which is "a surface-ripened semi-soft cheese," using techniques brought over from... France. (I think.) I can't say I know particularly what that means, but I do know that it smells pretty pungent and isn't (for me) that enjoyable as is. However, once you cook it, it's very lovely (though I couldn't hope to describe the taste). I first had it on these mini burgers from Redwater restaurant here in Calgary.

Since I didn't really know what to do with it, I went to Dairy Goodness looking for recipes. I went directly to their recipe section, but just now I found their page describing Oka. The Mushroom and Oka Tatin recipe seemed like a good choice to me - I had pastry patty shells in the freezer that I needed to use, I have honey I don't like but don't want to throw away (might as well cook it, right? maybe the flavour will be disguised), and I do love mushrooms.

You're meant to use puff pastry, but I didn't want to buy puff pastry to do a single serving of a tart, and I had Tenderflake Patty Shells in the freezer, which I'd bought for something I've never made. (Also? There is an ice cube tray of frozen gravy that I made for that something I've never made. Yeah. I await the day a guest wants ice cubes.) So even though it wasn't going to work out quite right, I decided to use patty shells instead.

For the recipe, you cook the tatin in a ramekin with the pastry stretched over, then flip it over onto a serving dish once it's cooked. Patty shells come with a circle popped in the middle so that the "lid" comes off easily once it's baked and then you can stuff it afterward with the filling. You bake them from frozen, so I wasn't sure how it would work as a substitution for puff pastry. Hence my decision to try it two ways.

First, I thawed one of the patty shells before getting any of the rest of dinner ready. (I wrapped it in a damp towel to keep it from drying out, which seemed to work.) Then I made enough filling for two tatins, and started baking the second patty shell (from frozen, as it says on the box to do).

I baked the mushrooms without a pastry top at the same time and for the same amount of time as the one with a pastry top and couldn't really tell the difference between them. I think the mushrooms with the pastry top (the top photo) got a little more caramelized, but otherwise I couldn't tell the difference between them.

The pastry, in both cases, was pretty much a failure. You don't really see it in either photo, but it didn't cook properly. I left the according-to-directions patty shell in the oven longer than the box suggests, but inside it was still raw and oily looking. (I got impatient and just pulled it out of the oven unfinished, scooped in the filling, and took the photo.) The one cooked from raw was cooked quite nicely around the edges, but the steam from the mushrooms left it kind of sticky and damp in the middle and I couldn't bear to even try eating it. (I don't know if it had cooked through or not. I lean toward not, but it was quite nasty looking.) In both cases, I ate the filling and the crunchy, puffy bits from around the edges of the pastry cases and threw away the rest.

If I could work out the pastry issue (maybe, and here's a wild thought, I could use actual puff pastry like they suggest) I think this would be a great starter to a nice dinner or, with a salad, a really great lunch. It's gorgeous (though it'd look nicer with fresh thyme leaves across the top after it's cooked) and the filling tastes wonderful - sweet and savory and the mushrooms taste better than you could imagine.

Even though it didn't work out quite right, I didn't really miss having the pastry to eat with it; the crunchy bits were nice with the mushrooms, but I could have happily lived without them. I'm not quite sure how I'd serve mushrooms cooked in honey otherwise, but if I ever think of a way, I'll definitely try it.

Spring Vegetable and Bean Soup

My brother-in-law brought home a big tray of cut vegetables from work a few days ago, which were good but beginning to dry out just enough that I didn't really want to eat them as they were. I thought that soup would be a good way to use up at least the carrots and celery - I don't eat raw celery anyway, I don't know if it's an allergen, but it makes my lips and tongue go numb if I eat it raw - and maybe the cauliflower as well.

Then, when I was reading Jamie's Food Revolution, I found the perfect recipe: Spring Vegetable and Bean Soup. It used some of all the vegetables I'd saved, except for green and red peppers (though probably I could have added some anyway) and really... just sounded interesting.

It's a very straightforward recipe, almost plain - the mirepoix cooked in a bit of oil, then chicken or vegetable stock added, then cauliflower, broccoli, white beans, and fresh tomatoes added and cooked through. At the end, you're meant to stir in spinach, but I had none so I skipped that. I did add parsley and some crumbled bacon bits for colour and a bit of saltiness, but it was a really nice, fresh soup. Hearty without being heavy.

It'd make a great vegetarian soup, had I skipped the bacon. (Hence my listing it as a vegetarian soup. I only used the bacon to add the saltiness because we've only got table salt right now and I've turned into a suck who prefers to use sea salt.)

In the background you can just see the burned edges of my cheese toast. The only way I eat processed cheese is broiled until it blackens, so that it's kind of oozy under the burned topping. I had a craving for that a while back - kind of like the boxed mac and cheese craving, it really doesn't happen often - and now I've got a package of processed cheese slices in the fridge that I feel too guilty to throw away. Occasionally I toast it up when I'm eating a light meal, and it's nearly gone (I'd bought the smallest possible package), which is a good thing.