Comunidad Health Foods

Finally, a Thursday that doesn’t zip right by without a Thirty Minute Thursday post! I even refrained from updating yet again yesterday to make this moment even more epic. Has your withdrawal been too miserable? I have a feeling all of the blog-o-sphere giveaways, holiday foods and Christmas cheer have been enough to keep you occupied.

I feel a little non-conformist and perhaps even a little out of touch for posting a recipe that does not start with “c” and end with “ookie,” I have to admit. In fact, the only dessert recipe I’ve made from Rachael Ray’s book so far has been a banana bread, and that was a bust. I should probably pick out some sweeter treats to try, especially now that it’s The Dessert Season, right? Until I get around to doing that, though, this tuna sandwich will have to suffice.

Going into the recipe, I knew nothing about a “pan bagnat,” which believe it or not, is French. I did a little research and found out that it originates in Nice, and if I had paid more attention to the ingredients (basically a Salade Nicoise tucked inside a baguette) I probably could have figured that out on my own. I even wrote in my notes, “this would be good as a salad, too.” Go figure. All I knew when I started to make it was that it sounded delicious, and delicious it most certainly turned out to be.

Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s be honest – I probably butchered the classic Tuna Pan Bagnat until it was anything but traditional, but I still liked it. It was easy to make, really simple, and even – dare I say it around this time of year? – healthy. The lemon was refreshing, the bread crunchy and chewy at the same time, and the filling mildly salty without going to any extremes. Below you’ll see the Tuna Pan Bagnat as I made it, which really just means you won’t see any olives, anchovies, or capers in it (got an idea of why it wasn’t wildly salty when I made it?), and I’m pretty sure I sacrilegiously used a crusty Italian loaf instead of French bread. Oops.

There are quite a few dishes that I have come to realize don’t really require a recipe. Alright, if you’ve caught on by now, I tend to actually bend the rules of recipe-following quite a bit – but there are some where I actually feel silly bookmarking or using one at all. Meals like tacos/quesadillas, some stews or chilis (though I think I still have to perfect the liquid:filler ratio and certain spice combinations before I can totally leave recipes behind for those), pizza once you get past the dough and perhaps even the sauce, and, you guessed it: eggplant parmesan. Sure, there are hundreds of different ways to prep, season, cook, and enjoy this Italian dish, but at the same time, you can’t really go wrong once you’ve made it once or twice. Slice the eggplant, salt it and drain it, rinse it and dry it, and proceed however you like eggplant parmesan best: breaded and sautéed, “naked” and baked, pre-broiled and finished in the oven, even grilled and then topped with a fresh sauce and cheese would work. You add a fairly generic though flexible array of herbs – oregano, basil, rosemary – and you really have your meal.

As much as I love to cook and make eggplant parm for myself, I rarely am driven to write about each and every attempt. I’ve already written about chicken and eggplant parmesan, as well as what I like to call Saucey and Sassy Eggplant Parm, so why tell you about this one today? It’s not like I’m desperate for something to write about – in fact, I wager you’re liable to get sick of me before the week’s out and I still won’t come close to getting through all of the amazing foods I’ve been cooking up these past few months. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: this post isn’t really about eggplant parmesan.

It’s about sauce.

As is the case more often than not, I am on the quest for The Perfect ______: the perfect fudgy brownie, the perfect chocolate chip cookie, the perfect meatball. Well, I am also on a question for The Perfect Sauce. I have to say, L’s mom makes a dynamite one that I have the recipe for but just haven’t had a chance to make on my own yet, so it’s very likely that I already have The One slipped away between cookbooks on my shelf at home. But still, I didn’t feel satisfied, and it wasn’t until I made this eggplant parmesan recipe that I understood why. There’s actually no such thing as the perfect sauce. No one person could possibly only need one red sauce recipe! At least, I certainly need more than that. I need a lighter, spicier sauce bordering on a fradiavlo; I need a basic marinara that can always be there for me and please any palate; and I, and I do believe most people, in fact, need this sauce, this beautiful, deep sauce that has you drowning in its fullness before the meal’s over. The wine is the prominent ingredient; not the tomatoes, and it’s a truly gorgeous thing. Make this sauce. Even if you have to tweak it, as I did in trying to scale it down to a single serving yield. There’s no excuse. This sauce will change your life.

Am I being too dramatic?

Maybe.

But it’s so good.

Floptimism is turning into a little blog entry factory, isn’t it? It’s this time of year. I may be the only college student who is bored out of her mind by finals week. I can’t help it. Classes are over so I don’t have any more assignments to worry about, SDA inductions have passed so there’s not much else to do extra-curricularly, and let’s face it – how long each day can you really spend studying? I max out at a few hours, and that still leaves a whole lot of spare time. I’ve come down with a pretty serious case of the baking bug from all this boredom, but I just can’t justify making more baked goods when I’m currently trying to eat my way through one of the most obscenely large collections of leftover desserts currently occupying space in my little freezer.

So, since I can’t bake, I better write about all of those delicious leftovers instead, right? And today, National Cocoa Day, how can I not tell you all about these chocolate cupcakes that I made earlier in the semester for my sister’s boyfriend’s birthday? When I heard that he liked that Entenman’s Chocolate Marshmallow Cake, I thought I’d recreate it with a recipe I saw for chocolate cupcakes and the easiest, neatest marshmallow frosting you will ever find. Seriously, you just put 1 marshmallow on top of each mostly-baked cupcake and return it to the oven for no more than 5 minutes. And you have a melty, gooey, absolutely delicious (and totally messy, I’ll admit) frosting. Mine were extra messy because I was using these monstrosities of the marshmallow world that are probably 3-4 times the size of any normal, self-respecting marshmallow. I did cut each giant ‘mallow in half, but they still slowly took over the baking pan and left me with one heck of a mess. So, use a normal marshmallow, or even several mini ones. You don’t need much.

As far as the actual cupcake goes, I was decidedly unimpressed. I found it dry and uninteresting. In fact, I was ready to completely write it off and move on in my search for The Perfect Chocolate Cupcake, but then something unexpected happened. I wound up only frosting about half of the cupcakes, and so I stuck the other ones into the freezer. For SDA Inductions, I figured I would take them out, thaw them, and slice them up into thirds to make little cake-lets. I’d frost them with some chocolate buttercream I had hanging out in my freezer (I’m really not kidding – I have more frozen desserts than any normal person should ever have in her position at any given time). To my surprise, the once-dry cupcakes thawed into these almost-too-moist little cakes! In fact I had trouble getting some of them to not fall apart and get totally smashed. In order to layer the cakelets in the Tupperware once frosted I actually had to freeze them again just so they wouldn’t turn into one jumbled mess! Those chocolate cupcakes that I swore were not good enough wound up tasting fantastic and they were a total hit at inductions. Now, I personally want a chocolate cupcake that’s better when fresh rather than needing to freeze and thaw it to get the right consistency, but regardless, I was impressed by the end end product.

So whether you’re making chocolate cupcakes and plopping a marshmallow on top or swirling them with chocolate buttercream (and, admittedly, garnishing with a cranberry when the plain, piped buttercream wound up looking just a little bit too much like dog poop for comfort….), these actually wound up being pretty great! In fact, after inductions I just piled all of the leftovers into one Tupperware container, forming a giant mass of crumbly chocolatey goodness. I’m not at all dreading the night I sit down and dig into that freezer leftover!

Last night I sat down and planned out all of the dishes I’d like to make for the upcoming holidays. I’m still at the point in my life where I’m a guest at these holiday parties, not the hostess, so my plans are usually limited to about 1 recipe per party or gathering. Invariably these wind up always being desserts. I’m really excited for some of the baked treats I have planned, but I know that right now other people are more concerned about the savory side of things than the sweet.

If you’re still hunting for the perfect appetizer for your work holiday party or that New Year’s bash, consider these Hummus Deviled Eggs. These unconventional yet much healthier little bites are actually the first deviled eggs I’ve tried, so I can’t tell you how they compare to the original.

Actually, let’s back up, because I also can’t really tell you how these compare to, well, the real recipe. You see, I hardboiled 2 eggs (I was only making them for myself), and for some reason when I went to split them in half I was confronted with the most exuberantly yellow yolks I’ve ever seen. I hardboiled them the same way I always do, but these looked different, and I thought it would be better to be safe than sorry so I chucked them. I just don’t know enough about egg yolks and food safety to get too risky.  So what I wound up with was more of a hummus-filled-egg white appetizer rather than hummus deviled eggs, but I still liked them! They were creamy and light, but incredibly flavorful (owing largely to this garlic-onion bruschetta I got from Stone Wall Kitchen that packs a mean garlic/onion punch). As haywire as my plans for making these little appetizers went, I really liked them. I’m sure mixing in the egg yolks would be tasty, too, and since I absolutely hate wasting food, I’m leaving those in the recipe even though the ones I had didn’t include them.

The lights were bright in the room and the sun had not yet set outside. My two group members and I huddled around the crinkled, brown paper bag with anticipation. It was heavy. I mean, really heavy. What could it possibly be? It was becoming clear that the mystery vegetable sitting harmlessly inside of that bag was not a bell pepper. Or spinach. Finally, we reached in and wrestled out a large, oblong yellow vegetable and plopped it down on the counter of the university food lab. Ok, now what is it? I had never seen such a vegetable before, like a jaundiced pumpkin that had spent too many hours on a stretch torture device. What did it do to deserve that?

And that was my first introduction to a spaghetti squash. We cooked it, halved, in the microwave and shredded it into spaghetti noodle-like strings, then we mixed it with several different types of cheese and sour cream and baked it up to golden, melted perfection. Whatever this new vegetable was, I was hooked.

I now know it’s Fall when I walk into my grocery store and see squashes for $.79. I get extra giddy at that point, and the high lasts until just about this time of year when I walk through my produce aisle and see that the price has skyrocketed to a whopping $1.29. Ok, maybe I can still spring it, but the knowledge that it was once nearly half the price confirms the sad truth: fall is on its way out and winter is on its way in. Sure, winter brings with it its own joys and giddy-worthy foods, but I do miss my squash.

Before the season’s truly through, though, and while you can still at least find spaghetti squashes in stores, even if they are getting pricier, I wanted to share with you one of the very delicious spaghetti squash recipes I tried this season. I honestly have to say that I prefer a good, roasted spaghetti squash to a pile of spaghetti noodles, and during the Fall I have a difficult time justifying boiling up a pot of pasta when I can have this inexpensive nutrition superstar on my plate under a big pile of sauce instead. So, naturally, this recipe for spaghetti squash with a pomodoro sauce was right up my alley.

This recipe is not vegetarian, but it certainly can be. Along those lines, it could also pretty easily be made vegan. One thing, though, that I’ve started to notice as I’ve cut back on the amount of meat that I eat (largely a result of really only eating it out, rather than buying it and making it for myself) is that there are certain meats that I genuinely enjoy eating. Chicken breast, turkey – I can live without those guys. But there’s something about sausage (generally lean chicken sausage, admittedly – I can’t eat too much pork without feeling a little uneasy. I’m sure it’s 500% psychological), a really good (grassfed) beef burger, and lamb that I actually look forward to when I do get around to eating them. This recipe uses the first of those three – chicken sausage – and I think it adds a nice, spicy edge to the sauce. That’s just my opinion, though.

When I made this pomodoro sauce, I added in swiss chard but did so a little too overzealously – there wound up not being enough sauce and too much chard, so I’ve scaled the leafy green back to adjust the recipe below. Overall, it was spicy and robustly tomato-y, and the absolute best tomato-based sauce I have made to date. And when I write in my notes that it doesn’t even need cheese, you know you’re looking at one fine recipe!

It feels like forever since I’ve written a Thirty Minute Thursday post, between Thanksgiving and my trip to Cancun, but to make up for it I have two of Rachael Ray’s dependable recipes today. You see, there must be close to a half dozen different ways of making oven fries in her cookbook (ok, make that 4), and it seems silly to write a separate entry for each of them since they really follow the same basic preparation method. I haven’t made all of them yet – just two so far – but they wound up being pretty great and definitely easy.

The first one I tried was an herb and cheese oven fry recipe that I brutally overcooked (re: burned), but I still liked them. They had a ton of flavor, and I’m not even just talking about the char! The cheese was what burned, meaning that flavor wound up being pretty weak, so I can only imagine how tasty they would have been if I had paid more attention to them while they baked.

Next I tried “pigskin potatoes,” which were also really tasty, and very much like an oven “fry” should be. The thicker ones weren’t quite crisp enough for my liking, so I’d suggest taking care to slice them as equally as you can manage, erring on the side of thin (unless you like thicker, less crispy fries) – I know my potato slicing skills could use some work. Still, they had a ton of flavor, even moreso than the last ones, and were spicy from the copious amounts of black pepper that I added. I didn’t add salt, but of course – being fries – they’d be good with a little sprinkling!

Because I don’t really believe that these are separate recipes, but rather two variations of one basic recipe for how to make oven baked potato “fries,” I thought it would make more sense to blend the two recipes into one more generic one that you can tweak as you like. Add the spices or toppings that you love, and omit the ones that you don’t. Even consider switching up the base ingredient – potatoes – for a less conventional fry: sweet potato, kohlrabi, zucchini, and turnips would all work with perhaps just a slight modification of cooking time. 

 One Year Ago: Regrettably Hydrogenated Mint-Chocolate and Caramel-Butterscotch Candy Barks

I really, really wanted to write an epic food diary post from the 5 days I spent in Cancun. After returning, I have to say that I want to write one even more, because I ate some pretty fantastic food while there. Unfortunately, my camera’s battery went into panic, I’m-about-to-die mode, and I didn’t pack my charger for it (even more frustrating: it’s also not in my apartment, which means my camera is still on the fritz and I have to cross my fingers that it’s stashed somewhere at my parent’s house). Since I also didn’t bring my cell phone with me, I had no way of capturing these incredible foods for you. Maybe it’s for the best, anyway, since a full-blown account of what I ate for 5 whole days might be too long for even me to handle, and that’s saying something. Instead, I’ll just give you some highlights from the trip.

 

Upon arriving in Cancun, I was a little skeptical that I’d be able to get an authentic experience, especially in terms of food. I saw more American fast food joints (Domino’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, multiple McDonald’s, Burger King, even a Carl’sJr….) and American stores (yes, Cancun even has its own Walmart, and if this were a political blog you’d be hearing all sorts of opinions that I have about that) than I was prepared to encounter. Even the beautiful resort that I stayed at had some decidedly American, or at least not Mexican, twists to the foods they served (think: French fries as a side dish for quesadillas, a veggie burger with honest-to-goodness American Cheese – worst food decision of the trip on my part – and an alarming amount of Italian pasta and lasagna dishes). Still, I only had one meal that I actually regretted (the veggie burger), and I did escape the confines of the resort and downtown Cancun a few times to experience some truly incredible food.

Starting at the resort, we had lunch our first day at their outdoor Bikini Bar. L ordered this truly indulgent, perfectly tropical cocktail with pineapple and I think coconut. I stuck with (bottled) water, but ordered probably the best quesadilla I’ve ever had. It was a vegetable quesadilla, and I was expecting the cliché peppers and onions, maybe some beans tossed in for good measure – but what I got was a tortilla filled with queso fresco(a? I still do not speak more than a lick of Spanish) cheese, sprinkled with carrots, zucchini and mushrooms. It was such a unique choice of filling (at least from what I’ve experienced, particularly when I think of Mexican food), and yet spread some fresh guacamole and salsa and you have yourself a killer meal.

Also at the resort, I strayed from my determination to eat authentically Mexican in order to enjoy the best crepe dish I’ve ever had: think a mascarpone-type cheese and cinnamon-apple filling, with a fresh crepe delicately folded over it and sprinkled with walnuts. Then I poured a fresh strawberry sauce over it and pretty much went straight up to heaven. Seriously, all reservations I had about ordering something that is very un-Mexican disappeared when I realized how amazingly delicious they were. I let L have one of the sections and after telling me that he only wanted a bite, I left to check out the buffet and came back to an empty plate. You just can’t resist that cinnamon apple crepes!

 I don’t have any pictures of the other meals that I ate, but had a decent mole enchilada (a little too heavy and carnivorous for me – I might like mole as a veggie packed stew a little more), an out of this world black bean soup, and a killer Mexican “torta” which I thought would be like a quesadilla “pie” but apparently torta just means regular ole sandwich. Still, fantastic. I also had a spice-rub white fish cooked in a banana leaf alongside a mixed vegetable sauté and plaintain puree, a trio of unbelievable sauce toppings with breakfast (mango, raspberry, and chocolate), and some tropical fruits that I’ve been dying to try for ages, but wound up disliking because of their distractingly large seeds.

I also got to try some pretty novel drinks while I was there. I had my eye on a Banana Monkey drink (think: pureed bananas, kahlua and rum) but never got around to trying it; I was too busy with indulgent foods like tres leches cake, fresh passion fruit and guava ice cream, and complementary margarita cakes. I did order this “fresa de amor” drink, which was definitely appropriately named, because I believe I fell in love with that drink one sweet sip at a time. The two most interesting drinks I had, though, included “Green Juice” which was a sweet smoothie made from celery, parsley, pineapple, banana and a little bit of honey (don’t try it if you detest celery, but even I’m not a big celery fan and went bananas over this one), and – get this! – chlorophyll. You can drink chlorophyll. How crazy is that? I haven’t yet looked into the purported nutritional benefits or how it’s made (presumably some sort of tea-like filtration or steeping), but I saw it at the resort fitness center and just could not pass it up. I was hesitant, but it wound up tasting a lot like green tea – very light and refreshing.

I also snagged some Sweet Tamarind and Sweet Coconut, along with some swanky sample containers of honey and jam (1 each of black cherry and bitter orange), but I haven’t tried those yet. I was tempted by these amaranth-and-nut “cakes” or bars that L said looked like bird seed, but I was already spending a lot so I refrained. I also bought a Snickers Bar – I know, I know – because as far as I could ascertain from the label, it doesn’t have any hydrogenated oils in it, unlike the American version. Since Coke in Mexico is made with real sugar rather than corn syrup, I’m eager to do a little research and see if this is, in fact, correct. Does anyone else know of various foods, particularly candy bars, that are made with different ingredients in different countries? It kind of fascinates me, and if I’m correct in my meager Spanish nutritional scanning of the ingredients list, I’m pretty stoked to eat a Snickers bar for the first time since deciding to boycott any product with shortening or hydrogenated oils.

So there you have it, a little mini version of my culinary trip to Cancun! I have to say, even if it isn’t particularly cold here for the first week of December, it was tough leaving the warmth and sunshine of Mexico to return to what has turned out to be nothing but gloom and rain here. It doesn’t help that finals week is around the corner, of course, and so I have to bury my nose in my books for the next week. I probably won’t be doing too much cooking between now and the end of the semester as I try to clean out my freezer and fridge before going home for winter break, but I have more than enough backlogged recipes to share with you to hold us both over until I start holiday baking and have those delicious treats to tell you all about, too.


One Year Ago: Cauliflower Fritters




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