Newssaka, it's a Date!

The latest salvo in the war against leftovers came tonight with a series of offensives that our leftovers may never recover from. I think that in the war against leftovers the most crippling blow yet has been delivered.



For a salad: spinach, almonds, tomato, avocado, currants, brown rice, and ground flax. I dressed it with nothing other than Bragg's Liquid Aminos. It's something I've had around for years but seldom used. Lately I've been using it a lot. It has zero calories, tons of flavor, and is a great dressing for a salad if you mix in a number of other ingredients as well.

I don't want to be one of those people but Bragg's Liquid Aminos is a great thing to have in your fridge. For just a couple of bucks you can spray (or drizzle) this magical substance onto just about anything to make it taste better. The only downside is that I can't quite figure out what it is. I'm pretty sure I learned about amino acids in tenth grade biology class. I think they have something to do with mitochondria (which, incidentally, are the power house of the cell). I'm also pretty sure that all of that is wrong. It's been a while since tenth grade biology.



For the main course I took an elderly eggplant which was winding down its life in the fridge and turned it into this dish. It's like a take on moussaka except that it's so loosely based on moussaka that it can barely qualify to have that monniker. This is something entirely new all together: newssaka.

I browned some garlic and onion, tossed in some Jersey Fresh tomatoes (which, strangely enough, come in a can), basil, and ground beef from the freezer. Then I layered it with the strips of roasted eggplant, mozzarella, spinach, and brown rice (why not?) to make this casserole.



For wine we enjoyed some of the Tabor Hill Red Arrow Red that Jen's father had thoughtfully brought to us this past November.



For dessert I crushed up some graham crackers with a little Lyle's Golden Syrup and layered it with Medjool dates, melted chocolate, and coconut flakes to make this dessert. I call it a "Chocolate Date Mound" partly because of its shape, partly because of its ingredient similarity to the popular candy bar.

That freezer and those cupboards don't even know what hit them! We'll see the bottom of the freezer by midweek at this rate!

Here's to keeping those grocery bills low!

Duck, Duck, Gumbo!

After last Sunday's duck we still had some leftovers to use. If there's one thing Jen hates, it's leftovers. If there are two things Jen hates it's leftovers. Leftovers and grey, day-old poultry.



Behold: Duck Gumbo! I used some of the onion and peppers from our beans and rice and simmered them with the remaining potatoes from Kent, Connecticut. I also threw in a duck wing and leg bones to capture as much duck flavor as possible. As it simmered I made a dark roux with a little butter and flour. It is a long-standing culinary myth that you cannot make a dark roux using butter. The thought is that butter butter burns and you will burn your roux. I am here to tell you that that is a heaping load of malarkey. If kept on a low heat you can absolutely make a dark roux using butter.

Don't believe the hype!

All in all, a good use of leftover duck should you ever have an abundance. It's a little nonstandard to use our leftover brown rice as the gumbo rice but it worked out well.

There's precious little remaining in the fridge and freezer to use up now! February is going to be the start of something new, specifically: the food. Imagine what we could achieve when we don't have to empty the fridge and we get to buy groceries for things we actually want to eat!

It's going to be an amazing experience!

99 44/100% Vegan

Monday saw torrential downpours and gale force winds that ripped down trees and destroyed electricity and, more importantly, internet connections in our area. After making it through this two-to-three hour ordeal with no internet I'm proud to say we came out the other end unscathed. Electricity only flickered on and off but the internet was out of commission for several hours! This left me asking myself the question: what on Earth good is electricity if you have no internet? Might as well just take it all, cruel fate.



That night I prepared a salad for dinner using my now traditional Sesame Fig Dijon Dressing. At only 25 calories per tablespoon (according to my calculations via Livestrong.com's Daily Plate application.

I combined spinach, mixed greens, garbanzo beans, currants, and tomato and tossed it in the dressing for this salad. I've had variations on this salad for the past week sometimes adding brown rice, almonds, or whatever else we had in the fridge to get rid of. Considering the absurdity in how few calories there are in a cup of spinach (7, according to My Plate) you can pretty much have as much spinach as you have in the fridge then top it with a number of other ingredients. At 25 calories per tablespoon you can be pretty liberal with my Fig/Dijon concoction as well. I made a heaping pile of salad on the largest plate in our cupboard yesterday for lunch then topped it liberally and still had a salad that was less than 300 calories in total.




For dinner on Monday I made black beans and rice which I served on a flour tortilla with a dollop of sour cream. For the black beans I simply chopped up some garlic, onion, red pepper, yellow pepper, and sweated them in a little olive oil with chili powder, cayenne, and cumin. Then I added some frozen corn (the last remaining speck left from the farm share), and green onion. I mixed in some chopped cilantro at the very end and added some sliced avocado.

I served this over brown rice. I tried something a little different with the brown rice that I'd heard recommended recently. I browned it in a pan for about five minutes then cooked it with vegetable stock and a little Bragg's Liquid Aminos.

While I enjoy vegan cooking I just can't get behind vegan or vegetarian dishes that pretend to be something else. For that reason I used real sour cream. There are a few products out there that you can buy that are imitation sour cream made with tofu. You can even make it yourself with silken tofu, soy milk, lime juice, and nutritional yeast. But you really have to ask yourself, "Do I want to eat some concoction pretending to be sour cream, or should I just eat something different all together?"

Another day and just a dollop of sour cream was all that stood between me and a 100% vegan diet. Tomorrow that roadblock will come in the form of half a duck.

Half a delicious duck.

Welcome Home, Ducky!

This morning, at 7:00am, Jen returned from Salt Lake City. After having dined out for every meal since Wednesday morning I figured she'd be ready for a home-cooked meal.



For lunch, keeping with my early-day-vegan theme, I was able to utilize a good amount of items from the fridge to make this noodle dish with carrots, celery, ginger, tofu, noodles, miso teriyaki sauce, and chopped macadamia nuts.



For dinner I continued on with this theme and made a salad of arugula, avocado, shredded cheddar, lime juice, and olive oil. This salad was bizarre. I figured that I had nothing to lose by throwing all these things together. The result was good. Not great. Not terrible. Definitely strange. There may be a reason you don't see more salads with shredded cheddar in them.



For Jen's big welcome home dinner I started out by deciding to make polenta after a discussion with Jen's mom and Jen's sister about how neither of them cared for polenta at all. The result was delicious. I cooked the polenta with turkey stock, bacon, Parmiggiano, and fresh sage. I'm pretty confident I could make a vegan version that Jen's sister would like and that I could make polenta in general that Jen's mom would like despite their dislike for the dish all together.

I also sauteed some broccoli rabe with garlic.

For the main course I opted to make a roasted duck. I normally don't do it this way but people are always talking about how you need to score the skin of the duck so it crisps up nicely. I figured I'd give it a shot. I didn't add any additional oil to the duck. I just roasted it at 300 degrees breast side up for 1 hour, then 1 hour breast side down, then an additional hour breast side up again.

The 'X' marks on the breast collected most of the pepper when I seasoned it to make it look like this duck was straight edge. This duck doesn't mess with drugs and alcohol or eat meat. Unfortunately for the duck I do not hold these same principles sacred.

At least not at dinner time.

Catalan 101: Salty Tales of Ribaldry (and Cauliflower)

Jen leaves for Salt Lake City in the morning. Before she goes I must mention an unusual set of circumstances happened in the past 2-3 weeks. Firstly, I got this book for Christmas from my mother and father-in-law:



They picked up the book on their trip to Barcelona this past summer. I thought, "Sweet, a Spanish cookbook!" As I flipped through it there were pictures of amazing-looking recipes that I wanted to try making. I then started looking through the book thinking that my kitchen Spanish was likely strong enough to get me by enough to read most of the recipes.

As I looked through I noticed that some of the words looked Spanish. Others looked French. Yet having worked in kitchens and speaking a horrible but apparently comprehensible version of Spanish paired with five years of French and growing up in a French-speaking community with a French-speaking wife I was unable to understand any of the words in the book.

Hmmm.

It turns out the book is in Catalan. I am ashamed to admit that I'd never heard of this language which is apparently spoken in Barcelona. "No problem," I thought. "I'll just translate the words one-by-one with Google!"

No luck. There's no Catalan-to-English translation on Google. In fact, there are hardly any reputable sites on the internet at all that perform this translation. The precious few that do translate are pretty clueless about the intricacies of Catalan culinary terms.

Using the best translator I could find I translated the title from Catalan, La cuina comarca a comarca Berguedà, to English: The cooking comarca to comarca
Berguedà.

Knowing this was going to be a huge undertaking, I set the book aside temporarily.



The second related circumstance was that I received this fantastic collection of salt blends to try. Normally I'm not big into oddly flavored seasonings but these smelled far too nice to not use. The kind I decided to try was the Flor de Sal d'Es Trenc Sri Lanka. I usually don't build a meal from the salt up but I was willing to make an exception in this case.

Thankfully the container is labeled in Spanish. Unthankfully there is no English translation. My sub-rudimentary understanding of the Spanish language allowed me to translate part of the label which says that this particular variety would be good on chicken. Or would not be good on chicken. It definitely says something about chicken. (Pollo means chicken, right?)

I went to the website, Gustomundial.com, in hopes of finding a little more information on the product but what I was greeted with instead was a giant picture of one of their products (orange chili salt which I'd love to try) and the odd phrase "yes, we build up something new..." translated into three languages. Not quite what I was expecting.

Through the magic of Google Translate I was able to decipher the seasonings added to this salt: Coriander seeds, green cardamom, tumeric, fenugreek, chili, black pepper, cayenne, cloves, and cinnamon.





I used the salt to coat and roast a head's worth of cauliflower florets. As an accompaniment I also roasted some potatoes (without the seasoning) then tossed them in a mixture of sour cream, cumin, and cilantro. For some color I wilted some baby spinach with garlic and olive oil. As a protein I made a curry crust for some lamb chops, seared them, then finished them off in the oven.

The cauliflower turned out even better than I'd thought it would. Jen commented that as a child she would only eat cauliflower liberally coated in cheese sauce. She said if she'd had this cauliflower things would have been different. I think she gives a child's palette too much credit.

After dinner research showed that this salt comes from the island of Mallorca. Mallorca, coincidentally, is the Catalan name for Majorca, the largest island of Spain. The company that produces these superlative salts was founded by Katja Wöhr. A Google search of that name returns a YouTube video of what appears to be Katja harvesting the salt. It also reveals a Facebook page for Katja Wöhr who appears to own this very company.

Know this: In 2010 my culinary mission will be to better learn basic Catlan cooking terms and master some of this interesting cooking.

Also, know this: A friend request has been sent.