End of Year Review, Ciabatta Pizza and A Look Ahead

I am quite proud of what I've accomplished in this blog this year. Although it hasn't been a whole year that I've been writing it, keeping track of the delicious things I've made, bought, and baked, I have written more than 50 posts and gotten almost 1500 views. That's pretty amazing. I have to give thanks to my friends and family that have read this blog and promise you all (and myself!) that I will continue posting to it in 2014. 

Before I think deeply about where I've been, I want to add some photos that I didn't write a blog for in December. (It's been a crazy month!) 

This blog was named for my mother and all the meals she ever cooked for me, which I will never forget because there were so few. Okay there really weren't that few, but there were a couple tried and true favorites that we rotated through. One of these was Boboli pizzas. Boboli sells plastic-wrapped shelf-stable pizza crusts that you can spread sauce on and add your own veggies and bake and presto, you have delicious pizza without the hassle. (I've discovered that I love making my own pizza crust, but oh well. Having the crust already made is an amazing luxury sometimes.) 

Whenever we'd make Boboli pizzas, no matter what toppings we'd use, Mom would always spread shredded carrots under the sauce and cheese. She thought I didn't notice, and maybe I didn't for awhile, but then I realized how tasty they make the pizza. (And we're not the only ones who love this - Domenica's has a roasted carrot pizza that uses carrot paste instead of tomato sauce. It's wonderful - and half-price from 3-6 p.m. every day!) 

I had some yummy ciabatta that needed to be used so I made pizza, complete with shredded carrots. 

It tasted much better than this photo makes it look - New Year's resolution #1: TAKE BETTER FOOD PHOTOS! My phone takes pretty good shots but the lighting sucks in my New Orleans kitchen. Hopefully it'll be better in my Connecticut kitchen...

What a fun year it's been. I succeeded in the Eat Local Challenge and failed in my own "no gluten for 30 days" challenge. I've been feeling okay with some up's and down's, but not terrible enough to believe that I actually have a gluten intolerance. Perhaps I'd be better off without as much of it, but I cannot, in fact, live without cookies. I love them so much.

At church on Sunday I talked with a friend who "doesn't eat sugar." I wish I'd asked her if that includes honey, because I could probably do all right cooking and baking without table sugar but boy... if I had to give up honey I think I'd be very sad. It must take a long time to wean oneself off sugar. I admire her a lot.

I'm happy to say that I didn't gain any weight over the holidays but I could be fitter than I am. So I'll work on that next year. As far as eating goes, I really do love to eat and don't really want to give up things. Even though your life is probably better and longer if you don't eat certain things, I believe that we should be happy too, and being happy includes eating sugar and bread and ice cream and all the bad stuff now and then. I would like to work on restraint, though. It's incredibly hard to say no sometimes.

My mother is going to start juicing in the New Year. I've gone back to having smoothies for breakfast but I just couldn't drink all of my meals. I admire her a lot for her determination. Go Mom! You inspire me every day.

Much love to all of my readers and fellow food lovers - happy munching!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Six Months in the Making: 100% Local Chicken Soup

I guess I had a little too much fun this Thanksgiving because I got sick. The changing weather isn't helping either; for a few weeks it was frigid and now it's humid and in the seventies again. I hear it'll go back into the fifties next weekend. Oy.

Sunday I started feeling a sore throat, then Monday it was still sore and I developed a cough, and then Tuesday morning I had a razor-blade coated throat and productive cough (are you hungry yet?) and took a sick day. I slept until 11 and got up and cooked chicken soup.

It wasn't exactly a restful way to start the day, but I'm proud to say that I made pretty good chicken soup and cornbread. I used up the chicken stock from the whole chicken I bought a few weeks ago and added half a sweet potato, two small heads of broccoli, some herbs and salt. After letting it cook until the sweet potato cubes were soft, I had a bowl. Then I realized that I had just made a 100% local meal. Joy!

- Local chicken from the Crescent City Farmer's Market



- Local broccoli from the same vendor as the chicken at the CCFM
- Local sweet potato at the CCFM
- Local oregano and thyme from Hollygrove Market and Farm
- Local salt from Breaux Bridge, LA (leftover from the Eat Local Challenge!)

That's a lot of work for local food. I guess that's what it means to eat local. It was pretty good but I can't figure out how to make chicken soup taste like boxed chicken soup. (The key ingredient is probably MSG... oh well.)

Hooray for local! Now to get better...

A Hand-Washed Turkey...

In honor of Turkey Day, this bit of stupid:

You have to watch it all the way to the end to get my reference, but yes, it has to do with turkey. This fantastic video is from 2003 but I still remember the song.

Yesterday was of course Thanksgiving Day (and today is Buy Nothing Day, so as much as I'd like to buy rolls to have yummy turkey sandwiches I am going to go without) and I was honored to feast with my team at the Fourth World Movement New Orleans. I accompanied my turkey, green-bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, stuffing, and sweet potato pie with brown sugar bourbon, Beaujolais Nouveau and chardonnay. Not only was I in a food coma but I was also in a bit of a too-much-alcohol-too-fast stupor. Not drunk, but just unable to stand. At one point I was so full that I just had to sink into the couch and stare contentedly at folks. I have two Tupperware containers full of leftovers as well.

My contribution to the dinner (as it was really a Thanksgiving potluck) was a yummy satsuma and pecan cake. I wasn't sure how it would turn out as satsumas are so tough and membrane-y but it was delicious. How could you go wrong, really, with cinnamon-spiced pecans, sugar, and butter?

I adapted the Crustless Cranberry Pie recipe to make it more local and was thrilled with the results. Everybody gobbled it down, so I guess everyone else liked it too!

Before the wet ingredients were added, it looked like everything was covered in snow. =)

I freaked a little bit while the oven was pre-heating because I could have sworn we had a 9-inch glass pie pan in my house but I couldn't find it. Good thing I had these heart-shaped cake pans that my friend Maya gave me! They added a nice touch to the presentation.

So yummy. The top developed a crunchy crust and the insides were chewy and sweet. I highly recommend this recipe!

Enjoy your turkey sandwiches and turkey soup and turkey salad and turkey tacos and turkey...

A Whole Dang Chicken - and some promo!

We're actually going to start this off with a promotion (which also has to do with chicken).

A friend and co-worker recently opened a cafe in a restored and re-purposed Chinese laundry on Bayou Road here in New Orleans. Pagoda Cafe is run by Dan Etheridge, who also works with Tulane City Center and helped start up the N Roman and Columbus clubhouse where the guys cook hot dogs every Tuesday. All great folks. Last week I met another community member at the cafe for a lunch meeting and had the roasted chicken, pesto and arugula sandwich. Oh so good!

So after eating chicken at a restaurant, I tsk'ed myself because I had an entire chicken in my freezer that was waiting to be eaten. It was a little intimidating, honestly, and boy did it take forever to defrost. After a hard day at work where I knew I wasn't going to be able to go in the next day, I put the chicken into the fridge to start defrosting. Twelve hours later the chicken was still a little frozen. I left it out on the counter for a few hours and decided it was finally time to get it ready, frozen or not frozen. 

I Googled "how to roast a whole chicken" and found the simplest recipe possible: some salt, some pepper, some olive oil, and whatever herbs I could find (local, dried thyme and oregano with a generous sprinkling of TrueLemon). The grossest part was taking the neck out but all the other giblets were out so it wasn't so bad. (Turkey neck is also a big thing here; folks chop it up and put it in crawfish boils and it's actually pretty delicious). Also, damnit, if I'm going to eat meat, I need to be able to deal with the icky bits. And in case you're wondering, this chicken ran around and ate grass happily for the duration of its life (screw you, Tyson). I bought it from my farmer friend Nancy at the Mid-City Crescent City Farmer's Market. 

Once the chicken was prepped it looked like this (with just a little ice in the cavity).

It was actually really cool to rub a chicken. I liked the way it felt in my hands. I popped the chicken into the oven and roasted it according to the recipe. The house smelled SO good. It smelled so good that once the chicken was done I started eating and carving it before I even took a picture. So here's the meat. 

Mmm... meat. So much yummy meat. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. There's one drumstick and some thighs under there. What's probably going to happen is I'll freeze it; thanks to The Kitchn for their tips! 

Once all the meat was off I knew I was going to use the carcass, so I Googled "how to make stock from a whole chicken" and found this recipe. Just look at those beautiful jars of stock. I'm going to have some in about an hour and a half. I didn't have a huge stock pot so I used the biggest pot I had and got it going.  

The stock's currently simmering but once it's done I'm going to use it to make stuffing for Thanksgiving next week. 

What's everyone planning to make for Thanksgiving? 

Botched Baking

Now is the time of year when you actually want to be baking, especially when the heat is a little iffy in your house. It's been in the low 50s during the day and 40s at night (which in New Orleans is a big deal! it's even a little hard to type because my fingers are cold) and I'm all bundled up. I actually turned the heat on to try to get the house to 65; it was at 54! I've had the heat on for awhile now and I'm still pretty cold.

First I wanted to share a photo of some baking that a friend did. My co-worker brought in cupcakes for Halloween, which I thought looked great. She said that she'd put sprinkles on the cupcakes for a dirt effect but they melted into the frosting and created a Dalmatian-esque topping.

Okay, maybe more black mold than Dalmatian... but this is New Orleans after all, and black mold is kind of a thing here. The bones added a nice crunch and red velvet - how could you go wrong? 

Where did red velvet cake come from anyways? I Googled it, hoping to find out the history, and found all sorts of urban legends including that it was a ploy by the food coloring company to get folks to buy more food coloring during the Great Depression, that its secret recipe was leaked via chain letter from the outraged housewife who didn't want to pay the chef's $350 bill for his secrets, and that the red color is caused by a chemical reaction between cocoa powder and baking soda (pretty sure that's not true). Sounds like an NPR Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! game! And because I love BuzzFeed, here's their take on the cake. I didn't know that Emma Stone ever talked about red velvet cake but I think I like her even more now. 

So after my bike ride to Angola, which was an amazing experience that I didn't journal during (gasp!) because I was too damn tired after each day of riding (54, 73, and 30 miles respectively), I was left with a bag of peanuts, chocolate-covered raisins and raisins that I had eaten on the road. For some reason my stomach didn't react well to the trail mix so I was hesitant to continue eating it after I got home. One weekend before a potluck I was thinking about the trail mix and Googled "leftover trail mix." This is the recipe I came up with and decided to make. 

This is what came out of my oven.

Luckily there were two dozen other brothers and sisters of these cookies, otherwise I would have been sorely put out. The cookies had so much butter in them that they just melted. When I tried to separate these, both from the cookie sheet and from each other, they just came apart so I wound up throwing them out. I regretted it after tasting the ones that came out all right. They were so crispy and so buttery and so amazing. I think I would like this recipe better with chocolate chips and not raisins and peanuts. I'm keeping you in mind for next time, Whisking Through Life!

The third botched baked thing in this installment is a baked macaroni and cheese that I made a little while ago. I had a butternut squash that literally sat on my countertop for almost a month, just patiently waiting until I got my shit together and cooked it. When I got my hair buzzed by my co-worker in September we made baked macaroni and cheese and left out the butternut squash, though I had wanted to add it even back then. Finally I was making the comfort food just for myself and could add whatever the heck I wanted. The result is below, not a great rendition but a picture.

I essentially made a box of Annie's shells and white cheddar (the only boxed macaroni and cheese I've ever eaten, even as a kid - thanks Mom!) and added a few extra ingredients.

- the butternut squash, which I roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper
- crushed up bran, minus the raisins from leftover Raisin Bran
- goat gouda cheese that I had in the fridge
- grated parmesan cheese that I had leftover from eating out

I whipped everything together and baked it at 450 for about 20 minutes and - here's the botched part - the bran never really crisped but just sort of got warm. The macaroni and cheese, which had been so gooey and cheesy and rich, dried out in the oven. When I reheated the dish for lunch the next day, the bran was soggy. So I'm not sure how I could fix any of those problems... but hey, it was still a success when I first baked it!

Now it's time to go cozy up under my four covers and dream about breakfast.

Oooooooatmeeeeal...

I Love Bok Choy!

November at the farmer's market means bok choy and all kinds of other delicious greens. I've been eating a lot of sauteed bok choy (with bacon grease, with butter and garlic, with sausage...) and today I decided to try a roasted bok choy dish.

I Googled "bok choy with bread crumbs" and came up with this recipe: Epicurious's Bok Choy Gratin.

It's in the oven right now and smells amazing. I'm bringing it to a potluck and I'm crossing my fingers that the dish survives the bike ride there!

Cross your fingers!

Farmer's Market End of October Edition

Last week at the farmer's market I walked into heaven. The stands were overflowing with fall greens: kale, kolrabi, Japanese spinach, and other things I'd never even heard of. The thing that made me happiest, though, was red peppers. I've been wanting red peppers but since they weren't in season I made myself wait. You know the saying - and there were the red peppers I'd been waiting for.

Not wanting to go overboard, I picked up purple kale, red peppers, apples, green beans and shrimp. The shrimp was wonderful last week so over the weekend I needed to figure out what to do with all the rest. I went to Rouses, thinking I might buy chicken to go with the peppers. I remembered having some delicious sausages at a barbecue once and know that sausage and peppers go well together. My only mistake was buying the sweet Italian pepper sausage to go with the peppers - that particular type of sausage has fennel in it, which I don't particularly like. Lesson learned!

But, since I don't throw anything out, I'll eat the sausage. I sauteed the sausage and then added sliced red peppers and a little olive oil. I brought half of what I cooked for lunch today and have the rest for later. I ate the sausage and peppers on tortillas with hummus. Delicious (despite the fennel).

As for the kale, I've been putting it in smoothies but still had a huge bunch that wilted in the fridge. Not wanting it to go bad, I knew I'd have to eat it for dinner tonight. I remembered I had some bacon in the freezer so I Googled "kale and bacon" and came up with this recipe. It sounded perfect. I had to adjust the recipe a little bit as I did not have 2 pounds of kale or 10 slices of bacon, but I used up all my kale and all my bacon and thus achieved the goal of the meal. 

I realized something strange while eating this. Chinese food, specifically thin brown sauce, must be a combination of garlic, bacon grease, water and some leafy green because that's exactly what this dish tasted like. It was really quite yummy. 

For dessert I blended two bananas with some yogurt, a tablespoonful of carob powder and a little water to make a mock Wendy's Frosty. I won't be eating there until they pay their tomato workers a fair wage. If you're interested in this campaign, please click here to sign the petition and read more. 

What are your favorite farmer's market fares? 

Happy munching!