Lemon Chickpea Lentil Soup

It's been quite a while since I've felt like talking about food. Since I've felt like COOKING food for that matter. I think in the last several months, I've only made two things I've thought were worth a damn. This is one of them.

It's not so cold now, but we had a really cold cold-snap last week and I kept thinking about soup and how it was soup weather and then my iPod would be on shuffle and Almost a Full Moon would come up: "Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold/ Let's stir it together til we are both grey and old / Let's stir it together til it tells us stories of its own / Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold..."

I kept trying to make this soup - "Lemon Chickpea Lentil Soup" from Dreena Burton's eat, drink & be vegan (her blog can be found here) - but then I'd realize my lemons were gone too old or I'd not got any celery or I had no onion or some combination of the three. Like a perfect storm, I managed all the ingredients today.

With quilting, I sometimes feel like a project isn't really a project until I've bled over it. Well, I bled over this soup project. Several months ago I bought myself an immersion blender and I've never used it in all that time, so I finally dug it out, and nicked my index finger but good while giving it its first wipe down. That sucker is sharp.

In any case, this soup was a really delicious combination of red lentils, chickpeas, vegetables - Burton suggests either zucchini or tomatoes, but I had both so I used both - and a really warm fall-flavour of cumin, mustard seed, paprika, and some other herbs. The soup is finished with fresh-squeezed lemon, which I'd thought might kind of lighten it out of the fall-flavours zone, but it really just brightened and sort of intensified the flavours already in the soup. Seriously delicious. I'd love to post the recipe, but I couldn't find it online. Alas.

I think anyone who has filtered through the food parts of this blog very much can certainly tell that I'm as far from vegan as it gets, but I do like to cook vegetarian meals at least a few times a week so I'm forever buying vegetarian or vegan cookbooks. I mostly cook the recipes with beans in them because I'm still terrified of tofu, but there might be one or two recipes in this cookbook that I may, maybe, if I can talk myself into it, try. We'll see.

In any case, this is a pretty nice cookbook. (It's doing duty as a coaster under my bowl in the photo.) There are several recipes I'd like to try (even excluding the possibly-maybe tofu recipes). If I have any complaint, it's that there just aren't enough pictures. I love a cookbook with a lot of pictures - I like to know what I'm getting into. In any case, even if I don't try anything else, it's almost worth the purchase price just for this soup - really delicious stuff.

Channa Masala with Curried Potatoes and Peas

So it's been a while. I don't know. You know, I cooked and took pictures and blah blah blah but I guess I needed a break. Maybe I still do. We'll see what happens, I suppose.

I've had a craving for Indian food for a while and the last time I tried to make it - Butter Chicken from scratch - it really didn't work out. I mean, it was okay, but I do think my garam masala is dead (I don't make my own) because it just didn't taste right. And neither has any other Indian food I've tried to make in a while. I mean, it makes sense, I suppose, because I probably bought that jar of garam masala two years ago. Definitely time to be picking up fresh. Though I don't know from where, since at least the last time around I was able to buy it made fresh, not made by... McCormicks or whoever and sitting around a warehouse for an age before getting to a store and sitting there for an age.

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...

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.

Linguine with Roasted Tomato and Red Pepper Sauce

I have a tendency to buy a lot of food related things and then never finish them. I have couscous, quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, several varieties of rice, flax seeds, every sort of nut under the sun, jars of two sorts of pesto, two sorts of curry paste (maybe three... hm, I can't remember if I have a Thai green curry paste or not), Alfredo sauce, tomato sauce, a squeeze tube of tomato paste, a squeeze tube of aioli, bottles of four or five sorts of vinegar, bottles of fish sauce, oyster sauce, chili sauce, sweet chili sauce, sriracha, and sambal oeleck. Of which I've used... one (a mild curry sauce) in the last two or three weeks. And that's just the short list of infrequently used things I've bought.

So sometimes I'll go on a kick of finding recipes to use up some of those ingredients. (Or else I'll try to freeze it. All the nuts and some of the grains are in the freezer.) Today was "Finish the jar of roasted red peppers" day.

The easiest recipe to hand (besides just eating them straight from the jar) was another Cat Cora recipe, this one for roasted tomato and red pepper sauce. The general gist of the recipe is to cook and blend together roasted red peppers with roasted cherry tomatoes, some garlic, chicken stock, salt and pepper. You can finish it with cream, but we had no cream in the fridge and the only dairy I had (skim milk) was expired, so I gave that bit a miss.

I think this is the most disappointing of the Cora recipes that I've tried, but that's mainly because my sauce wasn't quite as saucy as I'd have liked. That's probably because I didn't have enough red peppers but didn't add more tomatoes or use less broth to compensate. It was tasty, but I wasn't so in love with it that I've got plans to make it again or even vague inklings of making it again. It was easy and flavourful enough, but I'd have been as happy eating a sauce from a jar. (Not that I need another one in the fridge.)

Roasted Curried Chickpeas with Pilau and Sautéed Vegetables

I think I'm going to be full for days after this dinner, and I didn't even eat all of it. (There's a lot of food in that bowl. There's a lot more in the fridge. I'm usually pretty good about not cooking more than one day worth of leftovers, but forgot to cut down the pilau recipe.) When I was planning what to cook for the week, I had some vague idea about making ginger pork, stir-fried vegetables and some rice noodles I've got in the cupboard, but I kept wibbling about it and going back and forth between that idea and the idea of making Kickpleat's Brown Rice Bowl with Vegetables and Roasted Chickpeas, which she'd posted a while back at Everybody Likes Sandwiches. Then the brand of chickpeas I like - Eden Organics - went on sale at my work, so decision made.

I started out more or less following her recipes, the chickpeas are pretty much exactly the same, as are the sautéed vegetables, though I used what was in my fridge - carrots, zucchini, mushroom, onion and snap peas. Then I suddenly found myself making pilau rather than the plain rice I'd meant to make. (I've got bags of rice languishing in my cupboards because I always seem to fall back on my very favourite: basmati. White basmati, brown basmati, doesn't matter. I love it so much more than any of my brown rice blends or wild rice blends or plain white or plain brown rice.)

The pilau is a version of the pilau recipe you can find at videojug. I vary my method depending what I want to eat it with and depending what I've got, but this is one of my favourite ways to eat it. (I should have skipped the turmeric though. I think I've had that turmeric since I lived in BC - moved away in 2002 - and it doesn't make for very yellow food any more.) Here's what I did today:

1 cup basmati rice, rinsed
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 handful cashews
1 cinnamon stick
4 cloves
2 cardamom pods
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 small onion, diced
1 tsp turmeric
salt
2 cups water
1 handful green peas

First, heat the oil in a pan. Add the cashews and all the spices except the turmeric. Cook until the cashews start to brown and the spices become fragrant, just a couple minutes. Add the onion and continue cooking, stirring to coat with the spices. After 2-3 minutes, stir in the turmeric and some salt. Now add the rice, stirring to coat, then pour in the water. Bring to the boil, cover, reduce the heat and let cook for about 15 minutes or until the water is absorbed and the rice is cooked. Stir in the peas at the end. (Or you could probably add them with the rice, if they're frozen, but I wonder if they'd get mushy.)

I could eat nothing but this rice, never mind the rest of the food, for days. Every bite is delicious and satisfying and good. I don't very often make this with cashews because what they do is make me want to stuff myself full of cashew-laden rice and never eat another food again.

Despite my deep and abiding love of rice with cashews, I really enjoyed the rest of the meal as well. The vegetables were perfect, even though they didn't quite belong with the other two thirds of the meal. (I mean, it was a 2/3 Indian-inspired meal. The vegetables sort of broke rank, but that's okay.) In the summer I like to make mushrooms and zucchini with herbs like this to eat with barbecued anything, but I think I liked them even better with ginger and garlic.

I could take or leave the chickpeas - I think I was wishing for something more soft and saucy by the time I sat down to eat - but they are delicious, especially mixed with a bit of rice. What I didn't finish of my dinner was mostly chickpeas though because the rice and the vegetables were both so good I couldn't leave room in my stomach for anything else.

Red Pepper and Chickpea Soup with Potato Latkes

These are another couple recipes from Cat Cora's Cooking from the Hip. It seems like I'm on a bit of a roll with her recipes right now, but I'm running into the point where most of what I still want to make involves fish, so I'll stop making so much of it so quickly - I can never quite talk myself into fish more often than once every week or two. a lot of the other things that I'm interested in are things I don't think I'd go to the trouble of making - sushi, for example - or things I'd like to try but can't get my hands on the ingredients easily or cheaply enough.

In any case, this soup didn't photograph well because my red pepper puree didn't really puree that well. It came out a bit chunky rather than smooth, but I'd used a mini-food chopper rather than a blender or food processor. The flavour was pretty amazing though. It's a very simple soup - onions, garlic, chickpeas, pureed red peppers, vegetable stock, and rosemary - but it tasted more complicated than that. I was really impressed though; I'd definitely make it again.

According to the recipe notes, this soup is called Rivithia in Greece, where it's eaten during the fast before Easter when meat isn't allowed. Most of the recipes I looked at online were basically just chickpea soup - chickpeas and rosemary and a few seasonings - but I think the red peppers really added something special to the soup.

The potato latkes were my first successful attempt at making a vegetable pancake. And they tasted pretty fantastic, if I say so myself. They kind of reminded me of colcannon a bit, though with onion rather than cabbage or kale. The recipe asked for sweet potatoes rather than plain potatoes, but you can only really buy sweet potatoes here (at major grocery chains) around the holidays, so I went the lazy route and bought a bag of pre-shredded potatoes.

All around a pretty good, if somewhat light, vegetarian meal. Though maybe light isn't really the word for it, since the chickpeas (for me) are hearty enough to make up for any lack of meat.

Orange Day Curried Carrot Soup

This was luscious and velvety and deliciously good. I've never made or eaten carrot soup before, and was a bit nervous about trying it, but it was quite nice. I found the carrot flavour to be very intense, with a nice hint of curry. It was less difficult to make than I somehow imagined it, though of course I could have done without washing so many dishes (especially the blender).

I don't think a soup like this is designed to be a main course and I was pretty much done with it about half way through the bowl (even though I liked it and would make it again). I didn't like the sound of any of the orange day meat dishes that were included in the colour cookbook, though, so soup it was.

I made a carrot-heavy coleslaw to eat with the soup, which made this a pretty carrot-heavy meal. I like carrots as much as the next guy, but it really was a bit much. I think the soup would be better as a much smaller course in a dinner, though I don't really know what I'd serve it with. (And also I don't have any smaller bowls, hence the large serving anyway - about 1.5 cups I'd guess, though perhaps a little less.)

In any case, that's six days of colour-coded hit-and-miss dinners. White, red, green, purple, yellow and now orange. Although I've enjoyed some of the recipes from the cookbook, Colorfully Slim, in general I've found them to be on the slightly bland side of boring and even taken as individual dishes I'm not really sure that I'd particularly want to make them to serve as parts of properly colour-mixed meals. And so, I think this cookbook might be consigned to the bin. (Or to the Things-to-be-donated pile anyway.)

Aubergine and Kidney Bean Moussaka

This is - finally - another part of the colour-coded food odyssey. I've had the eggplant in the fridge for several days but kept forgetting how early I'd have to start cooking it if I intended to eat any time before I should be going to bed. (Half an hour to salt the eggplant, 30 minutes for making the sauce, baking for 30-45 minutes...)

Purple is a tough colour, food-wise. There aren't really a lot of truly purple foods and most of the suggestions the book makes for getting in more purple weren't really things I'd be all that willing to try. Chicken with Plum Sauce. Cauliflower Beet Casserole. Ugh.

I finally decided to try Moussaka. The Colorfully Slim cookbook has a Soybean Vegetarian Moussaka recipe, but I had another recipe I wanted to try instead. I've got this vegetarian cookbook from Australia which is filled with delicious things that I often want to try but don't because the recipes are so large and awkward to cut down. Their recipe was a fair bit more complicated than the one in Colorfully Slim but sounded like it'd be tastier, so that's what I did instead.

This came out pretty well, anyway, except that it was a bit dry. Even though I cut all the ingredients down by 6, I think I should have left more liquid for the sauce since it wound up much too thick once it had baked, almost like a paste. Still, I could see myself cooking this recipe again sometime in the future. Maybe for more than just one person, though, since that'd be an easier recipe conversion.

Baked Eggs with Mushrooms and Tomato-Pesto Toasts

I made some delicious baked eggs for lunch when I got home from shopping in the arctic winds today. (It's not really that cold, but the wind is making it feel that way.)

This is today's and tomorrow's lunch (except for the toasts, which are today's only, of course). It's kind of half-way between a frittata recipe I frequently use and one for baked eggs with morel mushrooms that I've got in this little French cookbook I bought recently. The toasts are also a variation on a recipe from the book, called... what is it called? How to Forget your Ex with the stab of your fork.

The reason I bought the book, which is in translation, is not that I've got someone to forget, but that all the recipes are for single serving dishes and I have a deep love of anyone who will provide me with recipes I don't have to adjust. (Though I did adjust this recipe up for making tomorrow's lunch.)

Here's a recipe, for two:

200 g baby potatoes, cut in quarters
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper
100 g button mushrooms, cut in quarters
seasoning salt or an herb blend
1 garlic clove, crushed or diced or whatever
1-2 tsp canola/olive oil
3 eggs
2 tsp sour cream (or crème fraiche, though I've never used that - can't find it here)

Preheat oven to 425F/ 315C.

Boil the potatoes with bay leaves and some salt until just cooked through. Meanwhile, sauté the mushrooms in a little oil (I didn't measure, but it was less than 1 tbsp) with garlic and seasoned with salt and pepper or a seasoning salt/spice mix.

Butter or spray a small oven-proof dish. When potatoes and mushrooms are cooked, pour into the buttered dish. Crack three eggs over top, taking care not to break the yolks. Spoon sour cream onto the mixture, between the egg yolks. Cover dish with tin foil.

Bake until set the way you like them. The original recipe, which was for a single egg with mushrooms but no potatoes - I added potatoes to make it more substantial for lunch at work - suggested 5 minutes but my whites weren't even started to set by that point. I removed the tin-foil at 12 minutes, at which point the whites were pretty much set, though the yolks were still very runny. (If you tap on them, they're very jiggly.) Eight to ten minutes later, they looked as they do in the photo - the edges of the yolk were starting to lighten up a little bit and when tapped they still had some movement, but not nearly so much as earlier.

I'd have probably used more mushrooms than I did and fewer potatoes, except that the mushrooms I bought yesterday froze on the way home from work and so I had to use a couple of slightly aged (but not gone bad) ones I'd bought on Saturday.


For the toasts, to serve 1:

3 thin slices of baguette or a bun of some sort
a little olive oil, to brush over
3 thin wedges of tomato
1-1.5 tsp pesto
1 tsp Parmesan cheese, grated

Lightly brush olive oil over slices of bread. Toast in the still-hot oven after removing the eggs. Top with a slice of tomato, a dab of pesto (I didn't measure, but it was likely less than a 1/2 tsp per toast), and a sprinkle of cheese. Grate over pepper/salt if you wish.

Broccoli and Cheddar Pasta

This was my lunch today - whole wheat pasta with steamed broccoli and a cheese sauce. What I really wanted was an Alfredo sauce with a little pesto stirred in and some nice green peas, but I didn't have the right stuff to make an Alfredo and I wasn't in the mood for a tomato sauce. So cheese sauce.

I suppose there's not really much to say about a thing like this - it's so basic and easy, less than 10 minutes and it's done. I didn't put quite enough cheese into the sauce, so it wasn't as cheesy as I'd have liked, but it was still pretty delicious, especially with a lot of black pepper ground over all of it. Yum.

Apple Zucchini Asparagus Pizza

This is, you know, pretty much what it says on the tin. MacIntosh apple slices, zucchini slices, asparagus, and underneath a mound of caramelized onions. It's also got feta, Swiss and Parmesan cheeses.

It was a strange thing, and I didn't really eat it because I over-baked the crust and the skinny little asparagus sticks were remarkably tough to chew through. But I really liked the taste of the cheese baked on the apple with the caramelized onion, so I picked all those tasty bits off and ate them before throwing away the rest.

I think it would be really great reworked as a tart of some sort, minus the zucchini and asparagus. I'll have to think about it, see if I can talk myself into making pastry dough one day.

Chive and Goat Cheese Frittata

This picture is getting to be several days old now, almost a week even. I've been wibbling about whether or not to post it because I think I've done a similar frittata before, maybe just without the cheese and chives. I can't remember though.

And then too it's not a very interesting picture. I always make and eat frittatas on their own, but they aren't that easy to photograph on their own. I always feel like I should have put a pile of mixed baby greens on the plate, even if I don't intend to eat them, just for appearance's sake. But I don't particularly like dressing a plate. I don't often garnish things, and if I do it's because I intend to eat the garnish. (My next photo in the backlog has a sprig of cilantro on the plate, which I ripped up and mixed into the soup before I ate it.)

Anyway, I've been looking for ways to use up that goat feta that I've got and I've been kind of miserable about food lately, not wanting to cook and just not wanting anything, so I thought what I really needed was to make something yellow. (My love of yellow food should be well documented by now. If I don't have a tag for yellow food, I should.) The yellow peppers didn't look that nice at the store the other day, but the orange peppers were pretty good, so I picked one of those up instead (and orange is practically yellow anyway, right?) And finally, eggs? Easiest thing in the world to cook when you don't really feel like cooking anything.

And so, yes. Eggs with potatoes, orange peppers, chives and goat's feta, cooked to deliciousness. (Which was also a great lunch for work. I should make these things more often to take to work.)

Goaty McGoaterson Goat Cheese-Stuffed Pasta

All I can really say about this is that it's a good thing I made a salad because I didn't really eat so much of the pasta. I tried. But that was the goatiest goat cheese I've ever tasted.

This, actually, is a five-cheese stuffed pasta shell: Feta, Parmesan, Mozzarella, Ricotta, and Cottage cheese. Talk about a heart attack in a cute little pasta shell. Well, really, I made a four-cheese stuffed pasta shell. I didn't want to buy ricotta, so I used low-fat cottage cheese in it's place, and I had low-fat everything, really. Extra spinach, less cheese, lower fat cheese. But the feta that I had, I didn't notice when I bought it, but it was actually a goat feta. Feta style chèvre.

I'm pretty hit and miss with goat cheeses. Sometimes I like it. It's particularly nice (I find) if you bake it until it's all melty and then serve it on a salad. But I really, really prefer it in small doses and if it's quite mild.

This was not mild. This was full-on goat. All I could taste was goat. You wouldn't think the one thing that I used the least of would be so very over-powering. But.

I need to go scrub my tongue with a wire brush and some bleach because the taste still hasn't gone away.


ETA: I saved four of these and took them to work for lunch - I work in a grocery store so if I still couldn't stomach them, I'd have options. They were much less goaty the second day, somehow. I ate them mostly cold (just barely warmed in the microwave) and they weren't so bad. In the future, I shall try this with regular feta and see what happens.

Baked Potato-Cheddar Cheese Soup

This is a sort of... slightly lighter version of baked potato-cheddar cheese soup, with more broth than cream, skim milk, and low-fat cheddar cheese. It tasted nice, if a bit too cheesy, but even without all the extra cream and full-fat cheese, I found it too rich. It didn't take long for it to upset my stomach. (I'm usually okay with dairy, but I eat so little of it that it doesn't generally have a chance to bother me. When I eat too much or eat it in combination, then I tend to react to it. )

I think I would have preferred a soup that was more potato based, a bit more like a chowder, maybe, with just a touch of cheese instead of a cheese soup with baked potato in it, if that makes sense? I suppose I just need to keep looking for different recipes.

Tonight my brother-in-law is making Sour Cream Chicken, which is this slightly nasty looking dish made of chicken legs (skin on, bone in) and cut up potatoes cooked in a whole lot of sour cream and hot sauce/soy sauce/Worcestershire sauce. It tastes ridiculously good and I half wish I'd skipped my soup and stole some of his and my sister's dinner instead.

Spicy Tomato-Black Eyed Pea Soup

I was in search of a new take on my favourite comfort food - pasta fagiole soup. This didn't quite work, but it was an attempt. The original soup is fairly basic - onion, celery, carrot, garlic, some herbs, kidney beans, pasta, hot sauce for kick, and tomatoes. More or less.

This was pretty much the same thing, except that I cooked my own black-eyed peas rather than using canned, and I skipped the pasta. Instead of the hot sauce, I diced up a serrano pepper and a red hot pepper.

Unfortunately, the beans just had no intentions of cooking to an edible state. I've never cooked dried beans before, so maybe I just didn't let them soak long enough or maybe I didn't cook them long enough after they'd soaked. Maybe they need to be boiled at a higher temperature. Maybe maybe maybe. I don't know. I got tired of waiting for more edible beans though, and just went on with slightly undercooked beans instead. Maybe when I eat some of the leftovers tomorrow, I'll find them more properly cooked.

I also put in too much tomato. I wasn't paying enough attention to my proportions and essentially doubled up on the crushed tomatoes, so it turned out a bit like tomato puree, rather than tomato soup. So not impressed.

The spice from the peppers didn't pop through at all - too much tomato? - so for tomorrow's leftovers, I added some water to thin it out and a glob of hot sauce. Here's hoping the leftovers will be a more worthwhile meal.

Tagliatelle with Garlic and Tomatoes

It's kind of been a while again since I last posted. There are two excuses:

1. We had guests. While they were here, we either ate out or else someone cooked for everyone and I never got around to taking any pictures. It's funny, but I guess I actually felt a bit weird about taking food photos while they were here, though I don't know why since we took all sorts of pictures of all sorts of things. Still and all.

2. It was hot. There was a record-breaking high this week and the days before weren't all that far off. So I wasn't cooking. The only thing I made during those hot days was a Greek salad, which isn't interesting enough to photograph (and I have before). Mostly I ate nothing or else I ate out.

At any rate, after a week without making anything much, I had to ease myself back into the cooking saddle, so this is something easy and delicious: tagliatelle with a bit of garlic, barely heated diced tomato and some basil. So good. This is a really good way to use up slightly aged tomatoes.

Red Beans and Yellow Rice

Well, I don't know when or if this will get posted, at this rate, as my internet is up and down tonight and every time I try, I wind up having to retype this message. And that's nothing if not annoying.

At any rate, this is another recipe from a cookbook I recently picked up on Volumetrics - I think I mentioned it a couple days ago, with the Pasta Primavera recipe. Basically it's about a way of eating that lets you eat a lot of food in terms of volume, without eating a lot of calories. (IE. Eating mountains of vegetables.)

So this is a volumetrics version of rice and beans. I've never had whatever proper rice and beans would be, so I'm not sure how this compares to a more standard version of the dish, but it was quite tasty. Spicy and flavourful, even though it sort of had more bell peppers than I'd necessarily go after in any one sitting. I think it could have benefited from roasting the peppers first, just to get the skins off, because it bothered me to have little bits of skin peeling off here and there as I ate. (I don't like tomato skins in things either, if I cook them.)

The rice part I sort of made up on my own, trying to remember the ingredients for a yellow rice that I often make when I made Indian food. All I could remember is that it's got cumin and turmeric in it, so I did that again, and added some garam masala as well. It looks like it needed more turmeric to brighten up the colour, but I've never tried making yellow rice with brown rice before, so that might be why the colour didn't really take.

Anyway, this is what I'll be taking to work for lunch for the rest of the week, since the recipe makes a ton of the stuff.

Pasta Primavera with Tomato-Corn Chowder

A really tasty dinner, though clearly a bit much for one meal. I got this cookbook a week or so ago that's based on the idea of volumetrics, which is eating food that is high in volume, but low in calories. The idea is that most people in North America have lost the ability to know when they're full based on calories, and instead believe they're full when their body feels full. (Which is the difference, I imagine, between North Americans and the French, who seem to eat a lot of high calorie food, but who don't eat as much of it as we would.)

I can't remember if it was in this book or another one that I read about a study where people we given essentially bottomless bowls of soup, though they didn't know it, it would just keep filling as they ate it, and people would eat, say, four times what they'd have eaten if they'd been given a single bowl.

At any rate, the idea here is to eat the things you like, but to eat them in ways that volume is added without adding a lot of calories, so that you can feel full, without consuming too much calories or fat or whatever. So the pasta and the soup both have lower (or no) quantities of cream and other high calorie ingredients compared to similar, traditional recipes for the same things. They also have more vegetables in them, because vegetables are pretty well always big in volume, but low in calories.

The real test was how good it would taste, and they did taste good, though I should or could anyway have added some extra pepper to both dishes. (I love pepper.) It's fortunate that I like the taste of good fresh vegetables, because that's really what I got from these. They tasted bright and fresh.

I don't particularly like the colour of the soup, though; it looks like something from a can. Although maybe not because it isn't a fake bright red like canned tomato soup. At any rate, maybe it just needs some more tomatoes to bump up the colour a bit.