Thursday, July 7, 2011 Eating Healthy Takes Time (and a little money)

Yesterday I promised my husband two healthy meals - and I delivered, of course.

Wednesday is Farmers Market day in Darien, 11-6 in the lot behind the firehouse, across from Goodwives Shopping Center. But I began my shopping at Stop & Shop across the street. We all know how our trips to the Farmers Market can quickly get out of control budget wise. So I wandered aimlessly around the produce department, as usual, until it hit me. I was going to recreate the veggie melt that my husband missed so much from his days back at Tumbleweeds.

Tumbleweeds was a bar in Bridgeport, that closed before I even met my husband 16 years ago, but it was home to him for a rough period in his life so, even though I have little understanding of bar culture, I tried my best to bring back the feeling of home away from home.

I crammed my basket full of veggies - I figured I'd make a salad for lunch and the veggie melt for dinner. So I bought celery and broccoli and sweet peppers and Swiss cheese and a portobello mushroom cap and corn (20 cents each, how could I resist?) and an onion and...I think that was everything. Oh, and the wheat pita. 21 bucks and change...not too bad.

Then I wandered across the street to the Farmers Market. They key to the market for me is first wandering around all the booths to find what I'm going to buy and from whom I am going to buy it. I have my favorite farmers and I like to spread the money around. So I ended up buying a tomato and a cuke from one guy for $1.95, a squash and some green beans from another woman for 95 cents, a couple carrots from another booth for 50 cents and then a quart of cherries for 5 bucks.

I don't think I've ever gotten out of the Farmers Market that cheap!

So, I get home and start to prep the salad. I had half a head of iceberg that I trimmed up and I added some lettuce from my garden to give it some color. I sliced up the cuke, some pepper, threw in some carrot ribbons, tomato, celery. I made pasta and dressed it with an onion, arugula and basil concoction - this salad probably took me a good 45 minutes to make! (This is why I'm not Food Network Competition material.) It was damn tasty, though! Worth the effort, and our bodies needed the veggies after the holiday weekend.

Dinner might not have taken as long - I really should time what I'm doing, but I'm usually too busy cooking to take pictures, never mind keeping score. I prepped all my veggies separately - putting each one into its own bowl. Little bits of broccoli, sliced peppers and onions, squash circles, mushroom chunks and corn off the cob.

I cooked all the veggies separately but in the same pan - putting the cooked ones into a big bowl and tossing them all together at the end. The pitas I bought were ridiculously thin, like tissue paper - I guess that's how they're low calorie, there's nothing to them. So I carefully opened them up and scooped the hot veggies inside. Then I stuffed them with slices of Swiss and carefully transferred them to my pizza stone in the hot oven for about 5 minutes to melt the cheese.

Hard to eat because of the pita, but a fork and knife managed to get the cheesy chunks of veggies into my mouth. I don't think I nailed the taste my husband was looking for, but I did manage to make us a nice healthy dinner.

Two healthy meals in a row! WTF? It's a good thing we polished off a bag of Swedish Fish for dessert...

By the way - Check out the article I wrote for CT Bites about Dinner on a Stick Night!

-HH

Monday, June 20, 2011 Mushrooms for Meatless Monday, Monday

So here's me giving Meatless Monday a try.

I've been aware of Meatless Monday for a while, and I've done it on occasion, but more because I ate so much crap over the weekend and not because it was a national trend. I try to avoid trends.

But here we go with this DDelicious dinner construction...in poorly constructed sentence fragments...

Portobello mushroom caps - salt, pepper, olive oil.

Put cheese on top - grill.

Thin slice shallot, flour, fry.

Boil 4 parts water, add one part semolina, stir, salt.

Put it on a plate.

Eat. Enjoy. Rock on.

-HH

Thursday, June 16, 2011 Roasted Pepper Spaetzle Rocks!

I had this crazy idea yesterday. What if I used the rest of the roasted peppers left over from my Angel Hair with Roasted Peppers and Parmesan Cream Sauce to make spaetzle? You can put veggies in pasta, spinach pasta, tomato - why not flavor my noodles with a little of the flavor of home.

First, I gotta tell you, in my house we didn't call them spaetzle, we called them Hungarian Noodles. Now that I think about it this was probably a term they created in order to feed a fussy child. I can't imagine I'd have put anything with a name I couldn't spell or pronounce into my mouth. So the Hungarian noodles remained in my vocabulary, both verbal and culinary, until someone finally introduced me to the word. The recipe remained the same.

Enough of that reminiscing crap, flash forward to tonight's dinner and here we go...

Smothered Pork Chops with Roasted Pepper Spaetzle

Two huge pork chops

Marinate them in hickory liquid smoke, red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, paprika.

While that's going on slice up half an onion as thin as you can and cook in a saucepan with olive oil until they become translucent. Add one can of diced tomatoes and one clove of chopped garlic. Let that cook at a low heat.

Once the meat has marinated for 30 minutes or so sear each piece in a pan to get some color on it and then toss in a 350 degree oven to finish the job.

While that's going on boil a big ass pot of water. In a bowl mix 1 cup flour, 1 egg, approximately 1 1/2 roasted peppers pureed with a spot of water and about 1/2 a cup more of water (and salt, of course). Usually it's a 1:1:1 recipe...usually for me that is.

The recipe I had was 2 cups flour, 2 eggs, 1 cup water...but one day I got too busy talking to Marc while making my noodles and I added almost 2 cups of water! Well, wouldn't ya know those were the best noodles I'd ever made! So it's a mistake I keep on making. Thinner batter seems to work for me.

Now, I suppose you'll need a spaetzle maker, a piping bag might work, but I like piping bags. Pouring the batter into the spaetzle maker dispenses it through little holes, plopping the batter into the boiling water. Once it's all in there I like to stir it up to separate the noodles, they like to clump at the bottom and make one big noodle.

Once they float to the top they're done! Add some salt and paprika to the tomatoes to taste, take the chops out of the oven and ta-frickin-da! I assume you can figure out the plating from the picture. The pork chops were enormous, I only ate about half of it. But the flavors of the tomato and roasted peppers and onions all played so nicely together the pork was just bonus.

-HH

Monday, October 4, 2010 Kick-Ass Cooking, Kick-Ass Music and Kick-Ass Manners

That's what it's all about.

Cooking, obviously, is what started all this bloggingness. I've become a damn good cook over the last 9 months. I've made 24 videos since this all started. Some with awesome dinner party ideas, some with recipes for two and some just for fun. And, not only have I acquired over 300 Facebook fans, I've inspired two time dinner guest Jeff to start his own supper club. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what it's all about.

I can't, of course, leave out the music. I am forever thankful to Facebook for introducing me to the fabulosity that is Arcane Malevolence. Even better than their music is the fact that they're just a bunch of awesome guys, with even cooler girlfriends. And through them I met No Remission and Burn the Bodies (one of them is a cool girlfriend, there's some overlap here) and now I'm looking forward to another night of bands for dinner with The Midnightmares and, of course, Arcane Malevolence.

And now, to the manners. I've blogged about them before - but I think I've barely scratched the surface. There's a lot of mining to be done in the deep, dark caverns of modern "humanity." There I go with those quotes again. I insert them because I don't think we're very humane to each other most of the time. And that is most unheadbanging, to me.

So, that is what it is all about.

Bang on, my peeps!

-HH