There are some food combinations that I am a sucker for. I adore pork, I adore tomatillos and I adore Mexican food, and the combination of these three is my food bliss. Peanut butter and chocolate. Onions and peppers. I also happen to love chorizo, chickpeas and spinach.
Sidenote: I try to get spinach into everything. Seriously. Ask Shaun. I’ll wait.
Recently, Mark Bittman got these three together for a flavorful and easy dish, and tonight I ate it.
This is a great weeknight dinner — filling and inexpensive, light on meat, full of leafy greens. The breadcrumbs added at the end provide a great texture and perhaps more importantly a touch of what I’ll call delicious carb-y-ness. I threw in an onion at the beginning, and I could see a chopped bell pepper working as well.
What are you waiting for?
Here is some food I have photographed with my iPhone lately.
This is the carne asada taco, the shrimp sope and the pork tamale at Bone Garden Cantina. It was a little too much food for lunch, but I’m not complaining.
I was finally able to make it to Antico Pizza, considered to be Atlanta’s best pizza. You really need to go there and eat it immediately out of the oven; it does not keep well. But it was quite good and to date is the best pizza I’ve had in the city.
I actually didn’t eat this one (a friend of mine did), but this is the Sublime burger at my local watering hole, Cypress Street Pint & Plate. Sublime Doughnuts is a local, excellent doughnut shop, so this is a burger served on a doughnut “bun.” I was thinking about this a little bit, because Cypress actually serves all of their burgers and sandwiches on giant, delicious ciabatta rolls, so it’s feasible the doughnut might make a slightly lower calorie bun. No? It was worth a shot.
With Valentine’s Day falling on a Sunday this year, yesterday, Friday, would seem to be the day to bring in a love-inspired baked good for my coworkers. Oh, and I always let Shaun try whatever I make.
I am a sucker for cookie cutters, but I have gotten increasingly lazy about rolling out dough. Since I have adorable, graduated heart cookie cutters that I haven’t used in years, I resolved to make roll-out cookies this year. I had a small, time-saving idea: I used my pasta machine. There are just a couple caveats to this method. First, even on the largest width setting, the dough is still pretty thin for a cookie, so you have to be going for that. Second, the result is a long, thin dough, so you can’t have that large of a cutter. I made tiny hearts. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them, but in the end I filled them with buttercream for tiny Oreos.
I’ve made homemade Oreos before, from (of couse) Smitten Kitchen. I actually used her brownie roll-out cookies recipe this time, and although mine were much thinner, they stayed soft and tasty.
We ate them all up, then headed home because (OMG) snow!
It’s time for another edition of Super Bowl food. Again, Shaun and I had a party but didn’t invite anyone, and our theme was Mexican. Why? What, you need an excuse to eat Mexican food?
First, we had guacamole and chips. Pretty standard.
Next, we spent a lot of time making pork tamales with tomatillo salsa.
My stove is so dirty. Would you believe I cleaned today?
Not pictured: margaritas. Many margaritas.
Finally, I made tres leches cake.
I spent some time the past couple of weeks looking at tres leches cake recipes and deciding what I wanted to do. First, there is this Martha Stewart Recipe, which I admired for its straightforwardness. Also, there was The Pioneer Woman’s recipe, which has a couple of extra ingredients I liked (vanilla extract, baking powder for extra rising). What I liked about both recipes is they do not contain butter. Butter makes cakes heavy; tres leches cake should be light. One concern I had was Shaun and I trying to eat the leftovers of a 9 x 13 inch cake, so I went for half. Here’s what I did.
Tres Leches Cake
- ½ cup flour (I used white whole wheat)
- ¾ teaspoon baking powder
- pinch salt
- 3 whole eggs
- ½ cup sugar, divided
- ½ teaspoon vanilla
- 1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
- 1 can (12 oz) evaporated milk
- ½ cup milk (any milk you have on hand is fine)
Preheat oven to 350°. Butter (or spray) a 8 x 8 inch pan.
Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Separate eggs.
Beat egg yolks with ¼ cup sugar on high speed until yolks are pale yellow. Stir in milk and vanilla. Pour egg yolk mixture over the flour mixture and stir very gently until combined.
Beat egg whites on high speed until soft peaks form. With the mixer on, pour in remaining ¼ cup sugar and beat until egg whites are stiff but not dry.
Fold egg white mixture into the batter very gently until just combined. Pour into prepared pan and spread to even out the surface.
Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
Whisk together condensed and evaporated milk. Save or discard half. (I know, I know, I hate throwing away food, but I hate being fat more.) Whisk in milk and pour milk mixture over cake. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 to 24 hours.
You can frost this cake with sweetened whipped cream (as I did) or with a meringue (or seven minute frosting) as they do at Atlanta’s best place for tres leches cake, Tierra.
This may be the fastest internet-to-stomach recipe I have found. On Thursday night, I saw this recipe for a chocolate chip cooke in a skillet on Ezra Pound Cake. Being a sucker for anything cooked in a cast iron skillet, this went in my to-make queue, at the top.
I made these to have for dessert tonight, and I ate mine while registering for a half marathon, which seemed appropriate. I went a little shy on the cooking time to make sure they would be soft in the middle. The edges are deliciously crispy. Now, someone come over and help me eat them all!
For Christmas Santa brought me Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2009, because, man, I love me some Cooking Light. They do such an amazing job with their recipes, and I’ve passed off the results as not light at all.
Tonight I made this risotto with Italian sausage, caramelized onions and bitter greens. I loved it, and I would eat it again and again. The use of arugula, in particular, was really stellar.
I have to say, I got a kick out of the couple people who complained about the fussiness of this recipe in the reviews. It’s risotto! What did you expect?
Last Friday my parents were in town for a wedding, so we all went to see the Boston Celtics take on my Atlanta Hawks. My brother was also in town, but since he was in the wedding, he had to go to the rehearsal dinner instead. Too bad!
One of the things that makes baseball and football games so fun, in my opinion, is that scoring is kind of a big deal. When your team gets a touchdown or plates a run, everyone cheers! Since scoring is more or less constant in a basketball game, I figured it wouldn’t be as satisfying for the crowd, but I was wrong. It was a semi-constant scoring high.
My parents watch basketball with a lot more regularity than Shaun and I. My Dad is into the Memphis Grizzlies right now, but nonetheless he and my Mom cheered for the Celtics (their hometown team). As Atlantans, Shaun and I rooted for the Hawks despite knowing nothing about the team (although I hear they are kinda good). In fact, on their first basket Shaun yelled,
“Go Braves!”
Later we yelled things like:
“Matt Ryan!”
“Chipper Jones!”
“Go Falcons!”
One Hawk I do happen to know about is Zaza Pachulia, but that’s only because he owns a restaurant near me. (Prior to seeing him on the program, though, I was pretty sure he played for the Thrashers.) It was a great game, and the Hawks won.
Afterwards I enjoyed an Elvis burger at the Vortex in honor of his birthday.
I’ve been itching to get into Asian cooking for some time, and for Christmas, I got not one but two cookbooks for this. From Shaun I received Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking. I started flipping through this book and came upon a recipe for Kung Pao chicken, which honestly I was quite amazed by because I figured it was an American concoction. It’s the first thing I made.
You can read the recipe over here on NPR.
I had no trouble getting the Sichuan peppercorn, but I wasn’t able to get a hold of any Sichuan chiles at the time. Instead, I added some chile paste to the sauce for spice and a red bell pepper to the chicken for extra color and vegetable goodness. Even though I totally faked it up, I also totally loved it.
I’d recommend this book and recipe for someone, like myself, new to cooking authentic Asian food.
I don’t eat out that often. Well, I take that back. I bet I eat out more often than average, but if Foursquare is to be believed, I eat out less than other people/foodies my age. Often when I do eat out a blank is drawn on where to go, so I thought I’d compile a list of new places I want to eat in 2010.
Places I plan to return to:
Mmm. I’m getting hungry already!
We love Christmas over here.
I am so full, and I actually can’t wait to get back to normal eating habits.
Cheers!