Back to basics

To be honest, guys, I'm struggling with creativity these days.  I feel like my creative "juices" are being used up as I start to get back into playing piano for the first time since college, work out, and (once again, I'm not doing this again) lose weight.  Oh and I work.  So less time for me!  But I still like talking about what Peter and I are eating these days, and we ARE doing some things that I haven't talked about.
One of the things that I've been trying to perfect the last year or so are fish cakes.  Peter ate these a lot during his upbringing (good call Mary Jane!) and, after he told me this, I decided to endeavor on them myself.  These aren't so dissimilar from the lentil cakes that I made, but I want to showcase this more as a method than a set RECIPE.  As a result, I've talked about a couple variations on the version that I'm making here afterwards.    One of them I've done, one just sounds good to me.  :)  If someone ends up making them, please let me know how they turn out!  Frankly, I'd love to hear about anything you make that I've written or inspired you to try.  Onward!
Sorry, guys, but I wasn't able to get a picture.  There are a couple pretty ones, but my laptop isn't compatible with the camera's card!

Basic fish cakes
Serves 3 (hungry) or 4 (normal)
1 lb frozen fish filets (in this case I used flounder; cod or tilapia also work well)
2 medium russet potatoes, chopped
Water to cover potatoes
1 cup breadcrumbs
1 tablespoon green goddess spice mix, or spices of your choice
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp salt
cracked fresh pepper
1 tsp canola or peanut oil
Lemon wedges, for serving

Combine the potatoes and water in a pot over high heat; bring to a boil and cook until potatoes are fork-tended.  RESERVE THE WATER and remove the potatoes to a medium-large bowl; mash.  Submerge fish in reserved water, and simmer over medium heat until fish flakes.  Remove from water and roughly chop.  Combine fish, potatoes, and everything else except for the oil in the potato bowl, and mix thoroughly (I find using my hands to be the most effective method).  Heat oil over medium-high heat in a heavy bottomed frying pan.  Form the mixture into patties, and cook, turning over once, 2-3 minutes on each side or until there's a nice color on them.  Remove, and serve with lemon wedges.  We enjoyed them with steamed broccoli, though a salad is also delish!

Spice variations:

1tsp  each sesame seeds and ground ginger
Serve with soy sauce and chili sauce combination
We've eaten this!  Very tasty!

1 tsp each cumin, chili powder and garlic powder
Serve with sour cream and lime
YUM.  Someone please try this! 

Winter is coming

I'm really TRYING to get back into this blog thing, but life is so fast-paced as opposed to when I started it!  And, in related news, I've lost around 12 pounds in the last couple months, and am starting to get it through my skull that I can't keep doing this lose weight-gain weight cycle.  I just need to eat sensibly and get my body moving.  Yay for life lessons!
After a few weeks of our usual stir fry, pasta, normal meals, I made something tonight that I'm actually pumped about.  It's a take on the ultimate comfort in chilly weather, potato soup.  Here's hoping you're not all tired of my soup recipes.  I promise I'll venture out one of these days and talk about how I roast meat and whatnot.

Potato Soup with Homemade Croutons
Serves 4

1 lb (around 3 large) potatoes, cubed
3 cups chicken stock (or water and your stock powder of choice)
2 cups 1% milk
1 package chorizo-seasoned chicken sausage (I used AmyLu; there were four links in the package)
1 jalapeno pepper, diced (or, if you don't like spice, use half a bell pepper)
1.5 cups frozen broccoli florets
1/3 cup diced green onion
Cheddar cheese for garnish
Homemade croutons (recipe follows)

Combine the potatoes and stock in a heavy-bottomed pot, cover, and bring to a boil over high heat.  Reduce heat to medium-low and keep pot covered, cooking potatoes until they're very tender.  Drain most of the stock from the potatoes, reserving around 1/2-1 cup.  Mash potatoes to desired consistency in the pot.  Side note:  creamier potatoes make a thinner, but creamier soup, which Peter and I enjoyed since there were plenty of "chunks" besides potato in this! 
Return potatoes to medium-low heat, and add the milk.  Stir to combine, and add the sausage and pepper.  Bring to a simmer, then add broccoli and green onio
n.  Simmer for around 5 minutes, and serve topped with a sprinkle of cheese and a few croutons.

Homemade Croutons

3 slices of sourdough or other crusty bread, in thick slices (3/4 to 1 inch)
Olive oil to coat
Salt & pepper
Paprika

Preheat oven to 400.  Cut the bread into crouton-sized cubes, and toss with 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil, s&p, and paprika.  Bake in preheated oven for around 15 minutes, and serve.  You'll probably have croutons left over after the soup is gone, so use them for what you will.  :) 

No judging!

Okay, people, I'm back.  I know it's been, uh, a year, but I've honestly been pretty uninspired the last year or so.  Between going back to work, the wedding (my name is Brune now!  YAY!), and a crazy busy summer, I've done a lot of "interpreting recipes" but very little of making my own stuff up. 
To be honest, I also dropped off the fitness wagon, especially after the wedding.  But I'm back on the horse and signed back up at the gym today, and even swam a few laps!  Part of it has to do with some issues I've had with my left ankle/leg and right knee, but that's no excuse to just not exercise at all and eat whatever I want whenever I want. 
But I'm back!  And I even got inspired and MADE UP supper tonight.  The temperature was in the mid to upper nineties today, and with a broken a/c cooking wasn't happening and so I tossed together the best salad I've tasted in a long time.

Greek Shrimp Spinach Salad
1/2-2/3 lb. cooked peeled shrimp, thawed if frozen
1 lb. spinach leaves
1/2 red or yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 avocado, chopped
3/4 cup white or red onion, thinly sliced
3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese

Your favorite vinaigrette (For this, I used Newman's Own Greek Vinaigrette.  No regrets there.)

This is pretty simple!  Toss all the salad ingredients together; it should serve about 4 as a main course salad.  Serve with the salad dressing; try not to dress it beforehand as that makes the salad soggy and not as tasty for lunch leftovers.  Peter and I enjoyed this with a crisp, citrus-y white wine.  Our regular go-to is Pomelo, but availability varies so much depending on where you live that I don't know what you drink! 

Also, a hot-weather tip:  Sparkling water.  So good, especially the lime or lemon-flavored kind.  Neither Peter nor I like pop very much, but are swigging this stuff like it's our job. Now carry on!  How do YOU stay cool on hot days where you just don't want to cook?

I've returned! And with delicious lentils!

Hello, everyone!  I know I haven't posted anything in awhile, and it's because I haven't had any amazing new recipes to share--UNTIL NOW. 
I decided to try a meatless meal one night a week for awhile for various reasons, and came upon this nice little vegan lentil burger recipe today that sounded promising, and of course when I was done the recipe looked kind of unrecognizable.  But hey, the method's there!
I'm counting this as sorta vegetarian because I didn't use any real meat, just chicken broth when I was cooking the lentils.  And spur-of-the-moment I decided to make a little sauce to accompany it, and oh man it made a difference.  Let me know what you think in the comments!  Glad to be back.

Lentil "burgers" with sour cream sauce
For the burgers:
1 cup uncooked lentils (I used green, use whatever you like)
1 cup uncooked brown rice
4 cups chicken stock
1 cup finely grated carrot
1 small onion, finely grated
1.5 cups uncooked oatmeal
2-3 tsp. turmeric
1 tsp. ground coriander
2 Tbsp olive oil (for four burgers)

For the sour cream sauce:
1/3 cup reduced fat sour cream
1 Tbsp dillweed

Bring the 4 cups of chicken stock to a boil in a medium-large saucepan; add lentils and brown rice.  Stir, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer for around 45 minutes, until the liquid is absorbed.  Remove from heat, and cool to room temperature.
While your lentils and rice are cooling, grate the carrot and onion.  Once the cooked ingredients are cool enough, mix everything together.  Form patties with your hands (this should make around 8 very satisfying patties), and allow to rest for 5-10 minutes while you heat up your pan to fry them. Extra burgers freeze beautifully if left uncooked.
Add oil to your pan, and heat until oil is shimmery but not smoking over medium/medium-high heat.  Add the burgers, and brown on both sides (this should take about 3 minutes per side).  While they're cooking, mix up the sour cream and dill.  Once the burgers look crispy and reasonably done, plate them and serve with the sour cream sauce.

Peter and I really enjoyed these, and were both satisfied by one patty apiece.  We suggest you try them with some roasted tomatoes or other vegetable; just toss some veggies with a tablespoon of olive oil and a generous sprinkling of kosher salt, and bake at 325 until they look delicious.
Happy eating!

Beef stroganoff, awesome style

Guys, I totally rocked dinner last night.  Once in awhile I get the urge to prove to my fiance that "the kid's still got it," and make something that will make him REALLY happy.  And last night, I successfully accomplished this with beef stroganoff and a side dish of roasted green beans (method borrowed from my sister, who read about it in America's Test Kitchen cookbook).  YUM. Let's kick it.

Beef stroganoff
1 top round sirloin steak, 1/2-1 inch thick
3 tbsp unsalted butter, divided
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
salt & pepper to taste
3/4 large vidalia onion, thinly sliced
1 handful mini cremini mushrooms, bottoms removed & thinly sliced
2 cups beef broth
1 tsp low-sodium soy sauce
1/2 cup (a couple healthy dollops) light sour cream

1/2 lb thin spaghetti or other "long" pasta, cooked and drained

Thinly slice the steak against the grain into 1/4" thick strips, and halve the longer strips from the middle of the cut.  Heat two tablespoons of the butter in a large pan over medium-high heat.  Place the flour in a pie pan or bowl and season with salt and pepper; dredge the beef in this mixture.  Shaking off the excess flour, arrange the strips in the melted butter so it forms one layer.  Now LEAVE IT ALONE, flipping the strips once after 3-4 minutes.  Brown on the other side, and then place the steak strips in a bowl, reserving the liquid in the pan. 
Return pan to heat, and add the other tablespoon of butter, reducing heat to medium.  After the butter has melted, add the onions and season with pepper, tossing them to get them evenly coated.  Saute, stirring occasionally, until onions are transluscent, and then add the mushrooms.  When mushrooms start to release their liquid, add the beef broth and soy sauce, simmering this mixture until the mushrooms and onions are soft to the touch.  Uncover, and reduce the sauce by around 1/3. 
Add the beef strips back in; the flour on the strips will help thicken the sauce further.  Once the steak has heated throug, add sour cream, stirring to mix it in thoroughly.  Serve over pasta.

Roasted green beans
1 lb greenbeans
olive oil (seasoned if you have any)
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 400.  Snap the ends off the green beans, and  arrange in a single layer on a cookie sheet sprayed with non-stick oven spray.  Sprinkle with olive oil, and season liberally with salt and pepper.  Toss to evenly coat the beans.  Once oven is preheated, roast the beans for 21 minutes, tossing the beans in the pan a couple of times in there.  Serve, and enjoy!

On Not Eating Out

            After a “spendy” May this year, Peter and I made a decision in June to tighten our belts financially.  Reviewing our bank statements and recollections/waistlines, we determined that regular eating out (for us, that means eating out on a weekly, sometimes two to three times a week, basis) was an area on which we focused too much of our income.  It made us heavier, we didn’t have as much money, and we missed the bonding and together time that cooking on a daily basis brought us.  Since we’re both, frankly, pretty good cooks who know each other’s tastes, we approach it from a team effort a lot of times.  Eating out, often with our friends, was taking away from the time we just wanted for just the two of us.  Hence, we endeavored to be better to ourselves physically, financially, and relationally.  We told our friends and family that we weren’t eating out for the month of June, and would be cooking all our meals (with the exception of Peter eating at the cafeteria in his workplace). 

            I’m not going to lie, this decision made June a hard month for us in a number of ways.  Due to the nature of Peter’s schedule and my inability to wait until 8pm most nights to eat dinner, a lot of the responsibility for cooking fell to me during the weekdays.   Since I’m a stay-at-home partner at this point, I feel a certain obligation to cook more and contribute more to the maintenance of our household since I don’t have means to give financially to our partnership at this point.  Don’t worry, this isn’t a “I’m a woman and hence ONLY I CAN COOK AND CLEAN” statement, and Peter has assured me that if he ever finds himself a stay-at-home partner, he’ll do the same (edit: he actually has done this, for the two months that we lived together when I was working a shift job at a grocery store and he was a graduate student).  It’s just a matter of logistics and wanting to feel productive in some fashion. 

So, in some ways, this made me feel more like I was a domestic partner, which helped me feel productive, but it also is hard to turn off the monologue in your head that you don’t WANT to be cooking supper five days a week; you have a master’s degree and should be raising money for non-profits!  It’s interesting how second-wave feminism has encouraged us to do it ALL: work, take care of a household and be a good partner.  But when one of those pieces is missing, there’s this sense of guilt that I, and a lot of stay-at-home partners I’ve read, feel.  We were told that we’re professionally competent and can contribute to the workforce and “ought to” do just that, but when the economy tanks and we find ourselves not able to fulfill that “ought to” voice in our heads, we struggle to find balance.  To find meaning without the three “pieces:” professional, homemaker, partner (and, down the line, I’m sure “mother” will enter the picture as well).  I know this isn’t a new point or even that unique of a story, it’s just something that I never expected to happen to me.  I thought I’d be an “armchair feminist,” if you will, defending women’s rights to do whatever the hell the wanted, whether that was being a cutthroat executive, stay-at-home mom, part-time professional, etc.  I expected to have to only really deal with the logistical challenges of finding a work-life balance when I added kids to the equation down the line.  I didn’t plan, in my years of higher education and initial career, to be tackling these issues as an unmarried twentysomething who moved to a brand-new city during one of the worst economic episodes in history. 

Clearly, my tangent above is not something that I only realized when we stopped eating out and I started cooking on an even more regular basis than before.  But it served as a catalyst for me to really sort out what I was thinking about all this, instead of feeling emotions and assigning some simplified reason for them, then telling Peter, “I need a pick-me-up, so let’s get some burgers and beer.”  It’s funny, actually, how we can fall into these patterns of not dealing with troubling patterns of thought and behavior by distracting ourselves with shopping, eating out, etc.  We escape home to break out of what we do in it.  Staying home for that month made me really face these contradictions in my own head, and sort out what I really think about myself and the situation in which Peter and I find ourselves.  Thankfully, at the end of the month, I found my head in a good place, and with some exciting professional developments to boot.  Therefore, we broke our ban on eating out at the very end of June, when I found out I had gotten a special events internship with a major agency in Chicago: Metropolitan Family Services.  Granted, it’s still unpaid, but I get my own space, professional dignity, and tasks that actually challenge me in ways that I can use down the road.  That meal, after a month of sacrifice and blogging and creativity, tasted and felt better than all the meals in May put together. 

Peter and I have now started eating out again, but not nearly as frequently.  We’re willing to take into consideration logistics and context for staying home versus just grabbing something if we’re at an airport or getting into town after a week traveling.  But we’ve resolved that instead of eating out 5+ times a month at pubs, bars and basic restaurants, we’d rather have one or two meals that are prepared by formidably talented people in an awesome atmosphere.  In other words, we’d rather spend $100 at one meal for two on a night that we’ve planned for than spend $200 on burgers and beer once or twice a week with whoever wants to meet up with us.  It’s working so far, and the freedom to stay in our own house with no shame about what I’m doing or not doing is the best part.  

So what do you all think?  Is this struggle to find balance in your work and the rest of your roles in life made easier or harder by having a paying job?  Why?  

Summery hot and sour soup

Hello, lovelies!
I took a break from posting on Friday since I didn't have many culinary ideas the last week or so.  But after my friend's wedding yesterday and having a (tasty) steak dinner at the reception, Peter and I were planning on a lighter meal tonight.  So, inspired by a cartoon we saw this morning, I endeavored to make a soup we've been experimenting with a bit recently.
Yes, it's hot, but it's a pretty light soup and incorporates some Asian tastes that we love.  It's basically a loose interpretation of hot-and-sour soup, with a lot more veggies than the versions typically served in restaurants.  Suggestions for changes to the recipe, as always, follow.

Chicken Hot and Sour Soup
2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
1/2 medium vidalia onion, chopped
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1.5 tsp ground ginger
1/2 Tbsp. ground cumin
Salt and pepper to taste

2 cups chicken stock
2 cups water
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1 Tbsp soy sauce

1/2 cup carrots, chopped
1/2 cup red and green bell pepper, chopped
1 jalapeno or serrano pepper, chopped
1/3 cup mushrooms, sliced
1/4 cup frozen peas
2 oz. dry pasta such as angel hair or spaghetti

Chop the chicken into bite-size pieces, and dice the onion.  Heat olive oil in a 2-quart pot over medium-high heat, and add onion and chicken.  Season liberally with the ginger and cumin, and sprinkle evenly with salt and pepper (easy on the salt, though; we have chicken stock and soy sauce being added later on!).  Saute mixture over medium-high heat until chicken is browned and the bottom of the pan has a decent amount of fond (the brown stuff at the bottom of a pan after you've browned meat). 
At this point, add the chicken stock, water, vinegar and soy sauce.  Bring to a boil, scraping the bottom of the pan to deglaze it.  Add carrots and mushrooms, and lower heat to medium. 

After roughly 2-3 minutes, add the peas, peppers and pasta to the soup (Ha!  The 3 p's!).  I took a picture below of a handy way to measure 2 ounces of pasta: when you grip it in your hand, the diameter of the pasta bundle should be roughly that of a quarter.  The angle of this picture makes it look a bit larger, but it isn't, I assure you!

Simmer over medium heat until the pasta is done, serve, and enjoy!  Serves 3-4.

You'll notice in my actual execution of the soup that I added the peppers and peas before the pasta; don't do that.  It overcooks them, since they're in pretty small pieces and tend to cook rapidly anyway.
Also, this functionally comes out like a soup/noodle bowl, and we both found forks useful in eating this!

Possible variations:
Add whatever veggies you want, really.  I will advocate heavily for keeping carrots in there since it brings a lovely sweetness paired with the sour broth, and the mushrooms bring a rich flavor to the soup.  But, obviously, if you don't like mushrooms or don't like carrots, substitute as needed.
To take out some of the heat, remove the ribs and seeds of the jalapeno/serrano pepper before chopping.
Of course, chopped fresh ginger would always bring a nice depth of flavor to this versus powdered ginger; add it when you're sauteing the chicken and onion.  Water chestnuts and bamboo would also be welcome additions I'm sure. 

As always, I hope you enjoy this recipe as we have!  Take care!