What's for Dinner - Chicken a la Provencal

This is a slightly modified recipe from a cookbook lent to me by a good work friend. The cookbook is Super Suppers Cookbook by Judie Byrd and it's supposed to be full of recipes to be made ahead and prepared later when time is short. While the recipes were tasty-looking, most of them didn't have any instructions for freezing or reheating, and they didn't give you an easy guide to scaling up the recipe to make a bigger batch for freezing. I did copy out a few recipes from it that I want to try, but if you're looking for a big-batch cook-and-freeze cookbook, skip this one. I'll be posting a giant cookbook review soon to go over the 5 cookbooks I've recently read.

So. On to the recipe. I figured it was a good one for dinner and I'd try freezing the leftovers for fun and see how it turned out. Stay tuned for that in a week or two. They call it "Chicken a la Provencal" but I'd call it balsamic chicken and peppers with oregano. Or something else equally descriptive and unpretentious. Don't you like knowing exactly what you're getting in a recipe? I had more chicken to use up than the recipe called for, so I scaled everything up a little bit and ended up with:

5 chicken breasts pounded flat
1 red and one green pepper, cut into thin strips
1 onion, sliced thin
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp basil
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
olive oil
salt and pepper

I salted and peppered the chicken, then dropped the flattened pieces into a pan (in two batches, because I didn't have room) with some olive oil and cooked them until they stopped running pink juices. About 5 minutes per side, but it will depend on how flat you smashed them. When the chicken is done, remove to a plate and then cook the cut veggies and spices with some more olive oil until the onions soften and brown a little. At that point, stir in the balsamic vinegar, then put the chicken and any juices back into the pan and mix everything up a little to cover the chicken. Put a lid or cover on the pan, and let it simmer on a lower heat for a couple of minutes.


This was fabulous. I didn't have high expectations when I started, but the oregano and garlic and balsamic vinegar made the veggies incredible, and the chicken picked up just enough flavor from the balsamic dunk at the end. I served it with roasted potatoes, but I think I'll do mashed next time.

Delicious Smoothies

Since I don't yet have any canning skills, I need an alternative use for squishy fruit. I've started buying the big yogurt container instead of the little four-packs, because it ends up being cheaper and produces less waste. A week ago, when I was spooning out some yogurt into a little plastic container for my lunch, I spotted a smoothie recipe printed on the foil lid of the yogurt. It was pretty generic, along the lines of:

Pick a fruit juice.
Pick a fruit.

1 cup Dannon Light & Fit Vanilla Yogurt
1/2 cup whatever juice
1/2 cup whatever fruit (fresh or canned)
1/2 cup ice cubes

Pulverize it in a blender and enjoy a smoothie!



I did so for dessert later that night, using strawberries the first time because we managed to get almost all the way through the Costco package before they got squishy and unappetizing, and I really didn't want to waste them. My juice was a cranberry-raspberry blend. It turned out great!

Next time I tried blueberries and peaches, with plain yogurt instead of vanilla, and the same juice. I should have stuck to vanilla yogurt, or at least added honey, because it was too tart. Also, the blueberry skins stayed very visible and stringy, and I didn't like that. Next time I use blueberries I'll try blending them first, before adding the rest.

I've been serving up the smoothies in coffee mugs for sipping, because I don't have straws around. It would be neat and fancy if I had big milkshake glasses for these, but they taste just as delicious in a mug, trust me.


My latest concoction was banana and cherry, and at this point I'm not bothering with a recipe any more. I dumped in a few ice cubes, a banana, a dozen or so pitted cherries, a teaspoon of honey, a big dollop of plain yogurt, a drop of vanilla extract, and a splash of milk at the end to thin it out a little. Yummy.

I'm told that if you use frozen fruit, you can skip the ice cubes, so I'll be experimenting with that soon. I have a bag of blueberries in the freezer that were too soft to snack on - I was going to dump them into muffins, but I'm sure they would be happy in a smoothie too. I'll also buy some frozen orange juice so I can add it to my smoothies by the spoonful when I want a citrus kick.

I'm a smoothie addict now!

Jen's Library - The Book Of Awesome

The Book of Awesome
by Neil Pasricha

I read a lot of odd blogs. Some of them are nerdy and full of graphs, some of them are about disastrous cakes, cats with poor English skills, or people questionably dressed at WalMart.

I'm not sure when or how I stumbled onto 1000awesomethings.com, but I did, and my life is better for it. This guy uses his online existence to celebrate all the little things that make life awseome. It's so easy to pick out all the irritating things in your day, and so easy to overlook the small moments of awesome, so I'm glad this guy has decided to remind us about just how many things out there can make you smile if you take the time to notice them.

This book is pretty much the blog in print form - dozens of one-or-two-page mini-essays about individual awesome things.

Like being home sick from school (or work) and watching The Price is Right. Peeling an orange in one long strip. Hitting all the green lights in a row. Finding there's just enough milk left for your cereal. All little, silly things, but they're like little presents and they can really make you feel awesome.

I was reading it at work, and as usual, my nosy coworkers asked what I was reading. Usually my answer leaves them shaking their heads and thinking I'm a dork, but this book got them all interested. "What kind of awesome things?" they asked. And so we talked about our own little moments of awesome, which in itself made for a moment of awesome. Very meta.

Jen's Library - Big Green Purse

Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World
by Diane MacEachern

Oh, book sale finds, how do I love thee.

I have several awesome friends who are, to varying degrees, into the green, organic, and local food movements. I found this at the big Bethesda book sale in the spring and thought it would make a great gift for one of them, but then I ended up reading it first because I couldn't help myself. The best part is, none of these friends would be offended about receiving a used book as a gift, so I'm still in the clear. :)

I'm no economics pro, but I can grasp the concept that demand will drive supply to a certain extent. If everyone stops buying products with purple dye #230 in them, manufacturers will respond by taking it out of their product so they can continue making money. Consumers influence the market - look at the availability of gluten-free products at the average grocery store today, when only five years ago someone with celiac disease had to go to specialty stores to find a candy bar they were allowed to eat.

Big Green Purse looks at our spending power and how we can try to use it for good, shifting slowly towards having more choices in organic, fair trade, and local products, and having those products more accessible and visible where we shop. It's split into chapters about different products, like produce, clothing, and cosmetics, along with explanations about what all the different labels and certifications really mean. There are a lot of tips to help you avoid being "greenwashed" (the author's term) by manufacturers and marketers who put "natural" and "environmentally friendly" labels all over their products, hoping to suck people in. These days, more people are interested in making better choices for the environment, and lots of companies are trying to make themselves seem as "green" as possible so they can ride that trend and get people buying their products. A lot of that labeling is meaningless, though, so you've got to do your research before you shop. She gives lists of examples of products and companies she recommends as being legitimately green, along with some which are not, because she encourages her readers to contact those guys and urge them to take some steps towards green-ness.

My problem with organic stuff is that it's expensive. I'm terrible, I know, but if I have to spend twice as much for an apple with no pesticides on it, forget it. I'll wash the stupid thing and get on with it, ecosystem be damned. And I know that's not very nice of me, because I should be caring more about the planet I'm living on, but if I went totally organic granola with my grocery shopping, I'd go broke quickly. Buying more of it would be good because it would be sending a message, however tiny, that people want organic stuff, so slowly and surely, prices would start creeping downwards... but it's hard for me to do that when the price of food keeps going up and the "greener" options are inevitably more expensive.

I decided to start with coffee. After reading the chapter on coffee growing, I figured that I could make the sacrifice and spend a little more on coffee in order to try and help save some rainforest. I'm only doing it for the tree frogs. The book says to look for "shade grown" coffee, because that farming method does the least damage to the ecosystem, but I haven't had any luck finding that at the big grocery stores, so I went with organic and fair-trade-certified coffees as a compromise. I have tried two so far, and I liked one of them a lot, so switching to that brand wouldn't be a terrible sacrifice for me. I can post coffee reviews if anyone's interested!

I don't see myself shopping for organic hemp t-shirts, or boycotting Hershey bars because the cocoa beans they use weren't grown in an environmentally friendly way. But maybe I'll try using fewer household cleaners, buying recycled aluminum foil, and growing more of my own veggies. Baby steps.

Jam!

I got jam in the mail this week! How cool is that?

There was a giveaway on my pal Tasha's blog, and I won homemade jam! A jar of 3-berry jam and a jar of blueberry-lime jam arrived this week in a shredded-paper-filled box which the cats have adopted as a new nap space.

Seeing those cute little jars really makes me want to learn canning. Not just for jam, but for sauces and soups and all sorts of things. I have a finite amount of freezer space and it would be great to be able to have shelves full of tasty homemade things I could pop open when I needed them. The trick is avoiding botulism.

Anyways, back to my jam review.

It was awesome. I was sad that I didn't have any english muffins handy to slather with tasty jam, but the week-old multigrain bread toasted up pretty well and I jammed the heck out of it, over a thin slick of butter, and it was so, so, so good. I opted to start with the blueberry-lime - a little more limey than I expected, and also not as tart as I expected. Not sure how both of those things managed to be true, but there you have it. The jam will not last, because it will be devoured. And I really need to buy english muffins.

Lessons in cleaning

My house has been in a much messier state than I'm comfortable with, but we've both been working longer hours than normal and our past couple of weekends have been busy with outdoor jobs, so I'm trying to give us a little slack. With all the undone housework building up and starting to annoy me, I finally snapped this weekend and got into a mild cleaning frenzy. Sadly, even with the frenzy, which you would think would help push me to get it all done, there's still a bunch left to do. I think we bought more house than we can handle, but hey, I'm still learning. At least I'm keeping us supplied with clean dishes to eat off of, and clean clothes to wear, even if we have to grab them out of the dryer because I forget to fold them and put them away.

I scrubbing-bubbled the tub and shower, scoured out the toilet with the teflon-laced blue goo, and wiped down all the counters and mirrors. One of the sinks was draining slowly, so I pulled out the stopper thing and cleaned all the soap scum off of it, but even with the stopper completely out it wasn't draining well. So I got the plunger. Anyone who is smarter than me or has tried this before can start laughing now.

I lined the plunger up with the drain in the slowly-swirling water, steadied myself, and plunged one short and powerful plunge. One, because that's all it took to get a jet of nasty black soap-scummy water shooting out of the overflow valve, covering the counter, the mirror, and parts of myself with icky, slimy, gunk. I am very glad there was nobody around to see the look on my face when it happened.

Good news: the sink is draining fine now.

The Farm Stand

I've been trying to get to the local farmer's markets so I can get fresh yummy produce and support local agriculture, but working a non-standard schedule like I do makes it hard to manage. Most of them run a few hours a day and are mostly after normal people get off from work, so from 3pm-7pm or so. Only one market is both open on the weekend and close enough to be reasonably accessible, and they only have a handful of vendors and not a lot of choice. Last time I was there, only two stands had veggies! One was coffee, one was cheese, and one was baked goods, all of which are great but not what I was looking for.

My mother-in-law recently introduced me to a farm stand near where she lives. I'm unclear on how the setup works but I think they get deliveries every morning from several local-ish farms and this place sells everything under one outdoor roof. I was happy to see that they are open almost all day, every day, so I can get to them before work if I want to make the round-trip in the morning, or I can visit any weekend. The selection was great, and the prices were reasonable. We got a monster cantaloupe, which we split, for $4.25, and I got a remarkable amount of green beans for $2.50. The "jumbo" cantaloupes at the grocery store are about $4 on sale and are half the size of the one we bought, and nowhere near as tasty. When we split up the melon and I brought home my half in a plastic container, it was amazing just how much melon was in that melon. I needed one of my MIL's biggest Tupperwares to fit it all in!

The real score of the day was the "seconds" table, where they had baskets of fruit and veggies lined up for quick, cheap, sale, because they had spots or were funny shapes. A couple things looked pretty sad, but I picked up a basket of potatoes for $2.50 and later compared it to the 5lb bag of red potatoes I had just bought the day before at Giant for almost twice that price (on sale!).

There was garlic hiding in there too! Bonus! I only had to throw out two of the big potatoes because they were too far gone, and I did have to chop black sections out of a couple of others, but in all, this was a fantastic deal. I used the big ones first and left the small ones on the counter for about a week, during which Mojo enjoyed sitting on them and trying to hatch them. I wanted a picture of him doing that, but every time I brought the camera in he jumped off and scattered his potato eggs all over the kitchen. Maybe I need to get a basket. But he'd just sit in that too.

Don't worry, I washed off all the cat-butt germs before I ate them.

Let the Grilling Begin!

I was tired of our backyard whining all the time about all the other neighborhood backyards and how they were so awesome and their owners let them have grills. Forget telling it that it's not mature enough for one yet, it doesn't even have a comfy deck or a working pool - backyards are notorious for not listening to common sense arguments.

So we bought a grill.



Of course, as for most purchases made by this household, extensive research was necessary before committing to grill ownership. Charcoal or propane? How big? Do we need a side burner? We checked out Consumer Reports (I highly recommend it for pretty much everything) to get an idea of what to look for in a good grill, but we also checked out the customer reviews on various websites, because while Consumer Reports does a good job testing things, a lot of problems only arise after you've owned the product for a while, and we wanted to know about them. And yes, some of the reviews are lame or obvious fakes, but I like to learn that the paint flakes off after a month of use, or that the knobs broke off in the first year, or that the grill bars are spaced just wide enough to lose a hotdog through. Those things are important!

We chose propane, because while we both love the taste of food grilled over charcoal, it's really too much of a hassle. The heat-up time and the cool-down time add too much time to the grilling session and would get to be annoying. We may still go get a small charcoal grill, one of those Sputnik-looking ones on spindly legs, but for now we like the convenience of being able to shut the gas off and not worry about the grill when we're done. We also skipped the side burner, because we're never going to use that. We have a stove. Maybe someday, in a power outage, I'll regret not having a burner on the grill, but I doubt it.

Did you know that the home improvement stores indicate grill size by the number of hamburgers you can fit on them? Seriously, I couldn't find a "square inches" measurement anywhere. The one we ended up with was right in the middle at a hamburger rating of 36. And the nerd in me was frustrated that we weren't given a value for the surface area of a standard burger patty. How can I make an educated decision if you refuse to educate me?

There's a new "Infrared" cooking technology that is all fancy and popular right now. From what I understand, it's sort of like having an oven instead of a grill, because it uses indirect heat. It's supposed to be better at keeping food from drying out and it prevents flare-ups and it is apparently the height of awesome, especially for steak. We looked at a couple and decided it wouldn't work for us, because we like food to be charred and crispy sometimes, and the infrared technology keeps the flames completely away from the food. They're hidden under a metal sheet in most models, so it really is like having an outdoor oven, and while I'm sure it makes some great food, the expense didn't seem worth it for me. This was a situation where Consumer Reports was loving these products, but the customer reviews gave a clearer picture. Yes they're great for what they are, but if that's not what you want in a grill, you'll be disappointed.

We ended up with a Weber Spirit E-310. Webers are more expensive but they have a very good warranty and they're not famous for nothing - the difference in quality was obvious when we were checking them out at Home Depot. The grates were heavier and well-made, the shell was sturdy and solid, and the grill seemed stable when we tried to wiggle it. It has only one usable shelf, because Weber decided to put the starter and knobs on the other shelf instead on the front face of the unit like many other models choose to do. That's the only irritating thing about it so far. We've grilled steak and hot dogs and it's done very well.


There's a rotisserie attachment we can buy, which is battery powered and will let us cook a couple of chickens in this thing, and I'm tempted. But I think we'll just play with the grill surface for a while and see how it does with chicken and sausages and burgers first. And I get to play with marinades now! I was forbidden from marinating anything we cooked on the Foreman grill because it would stick, so now I get to go nuts and marinate everything!

Backyard frog sanctuary

It ain't easy being green, but several dozen little frogs are making it work and hanging out every night in our backyard by the water-filled pool cover. One of them surprised me by using his little suction-cup froggy toes to climb the sliding glass door.

Isn't he adorable? I stood there squeeing over the little dude for a good five minutes, and he just sat patiently. He was quiet, but his buddies out in the yard were making a racket - it's amazing how much sound can come out of such a tiny creature. I should try and record the frog symphony one night and share it with you.

I desperately want pet frogs now, except that Dave reminded me I'd need to be feeding them live bugs, and that's just not going to happen. I'll have to be satisfied with our backyard amphibian wildlife refuge. Last year we had tadpoles in the murky pool-cover water, but this year we haven't seen any, probably because we're trying to drain it regularly, mostly to keep mosquitoes from breeding there. My legs can attest to the fact that we're not doing much to hurt mosquito population growth. Maybe we need to attract more frogs so they can eat more mosquitoes. Do frogs eat mosquitoes?

What's for Dinner - Smoked Gouda Mac & Cheese

I started with a Food Network recipe and played around with it a little, as usual. The comments section on the website hinted at the recipe being a bit dry, so I tried to fix that with more liquid and cheese. And then I added bacon, the king of meats. Here's the final list of ingredients I ended up using in my version:

1 box medium shells
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
2 1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup light cream
1/2 pound smoked Gouda cheese, grated (not sure how many cups it made, I just used half of the one-pound block of cheese)
1/4 cup grated monterey jack cheese (because I had extra and figured hey, more cheese can't hurt)
6 slices bacon
Salt and pepper

Fry the bacon really crispy - it's for making bacon bits to add to the mac & cheese.

Get your noodles boiling while you make the sauce: melt the butter in a pot until it's frothy, and whisk in the flour. Cook that for a couple of minutes until it darkens a little, then whisk in the milk and cream. Keep whisking so nothing burns, and let it bubble for about ten minutes, until it thickens up. The recipe said to stop when the sauce was as "smooth and thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon", so I was dunking a wooden spoon in it every couple of minutes. I'm sure I looked like a dork.

When your wooden spoon test is positive, celebrate by dumping the grated cheese into the pot and pulling it off the heat. Keep whisking! Your whisk will become unwieldy due to the glob of cheese that is sure to form inside it, but smacking it against the pot and/or poking it with your sauce-coated wooden spoon will help. Add some salt and pepper.

Add sauce to noodles, or the other way around, in a casserole dish. Then stir in the bacon. Mmmmm, bacon. I was going to add a breadcrumb topping but didn't have any left in the pantry, so it went into the oven naked. After 20 minutes at 375F, it was bubbly and smelled great!

Alas, my tweaks didn't quite save the recipe. It was good, but still a bit dry and not as cheesy as I'd hoped. The smoked gouda didn't melt well at all, leaving a chunky sauce instead of the creaminess you'd expect from a mac and cheese dish. Next time I'll try using smoked cheddar instead, because I liked the "smokiness" (and the bacon! Lord, did I love the bacon!) and I want to give it another shot. Why is it so hard to find the perfect macaroni and cheese??