Comunidad Health Foods

This time of year is always a bitter-sweet one for me. I love the atmosphere that settles in the closer we get to Christmas – it can be frigid and icey or temperate but rainy, and yet there’s still a warmth almost everywhere you go. The decorative lights are inviting, the gift buying and wrapping is exciting, and houses start to smell like pine needles, pot roast, and gingerbread. I even forget that I don’t love Winter right about now. But then, I can’t help but feel a small void inside of me, a little twinge of…regret? Sadness? Introspection. This is the time of year where I remember my grandmother most. If you knew her, you couldn’t not remember her around Christmas. Our house was decked in wreaths, garlands, candles, ornaments, and the biggest tree our old Victorian home could house. She lived with us until she passed away, which was over ten years ago now. The first few Christmases were hard. Then, the decorations slowly changed. The traditions changed. We no longer got a tree. Mezzuzahs and menorahs replaced the holly and mistletoe, now that everyone else in the house was Jewish. Everything about how we celebrated the holidays changed. More than anything, I miss the perpetual smell of cookies that would waft out of the kitchen as she baked dozens and dozens of cookies to give out to neighbors, friends, family – even my bus driver got a package each year.

I don’t know why, but as much as I bake, I have yet to take on those cookie recipes. I was hit with this wave of nostalgia too late this year, just last night feeling a strong desire to keep her cookie baking tradition alive, but know that next year I will be picking up where my grandmother left off, even if it is ten years delayed. I love trying new recipes and shaking things up, but I think you need a little reminder of tradition now and then, too.

I want to pause in all of the crazy baking schemes I’ve been in the midst of this week, and talk to you about a recipe that I think holds a lot of memories to a lot of people. Ironically, it doesn’t really for me. I feel like it’s almost this rite of passage to grow up on homemade rice krispy treats, and yet the first time I made them myself was just last month. I may not have my grandmother’s famous chocolate covered peanut butter ball recipe to share with you today (I’m pretty sure I ate at least a dozen of those every day leading up to Christmas when I was a kid!), I can share with you a recipe that I hope will bring back childhood memories for others. Because even if it’s painful, a little sad and bitter-sweet, it’s important to take a minute at this time of year and just remember.

These rice krispy treats are subtly sweet and very simple. They’re softer than a store bought square, but I haven’t yet figured out if that’s the recipe or the fact that I was maybe, possibly, I hope you can keep a secret, using stale crispy rice cereal. Please don’t judge me. They still tasted really good. I actually put the leftovers in the freezer which was a completely spontaneous move – I have no idea if they’ll be anything close to edible when I take them out to thaw – but I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I’ll let you know how they are when they’re not fresh. If mine ever were fresh to begin with…sigh. I’m doing a mighty fine job of selling these, huh? They’re extremely enjoyable, though, I promise.

This week, I’ve been more or less glued to the kitchen. Hannukkah started on Tuesday, L’s brother’s birthday was yesterday, my sister’s birthday is tomorrow, and then, of course, there’s Christmas Eve and Christmas day. The food part of my brain has been kicked into holiday high gear, and I am appeasing it by focusing this week’s updates on quick and easy ideas for entertaining food. As it turns out, I even have a Thirty Minute Thursday post for you that would be perfect for a holiday gathering!

Dips are popular appetizers, probably because they tend to be no-fuss crowd pleasers. However, some of the best (I’m talking to you, Spinach & Artichoke!) are worse for you than the dessert course. That’s not to say that if you love those dips and one of the holiday parties you’re at is serving them you should avoid them like the plague (in fact, check out this post for a slimmed down version of an artichoke dip), but balancing them with a lighter option is definitely a strategy for keeping things in check.

This chickpea and rosemary dip can do just that. It’s just as easy and fast to make as any other dip, but it’s something you can feel good about eating. It’s flavorful but not enormously filling on its own, which I think is actually a good quality in an appetizer – a dip especially. If you use crunchy vegetables as dippers (I chose broccoli), the fiber from those will help you feel a little bit more satiated. You could also serve it with whole wheat pita. Once the holidays are over, turn it into a meal by spreading it on a whole grain wrap and topping it with some spinach, tomatoes, and pepper strips.

The only warning about this dip is that it was a little bit tough to puree. To be fair, I was using my mini food chopper, not a full-sized food processor, and I found myself needing to be patient. It still came together quickly, though, and I really did love it in the end.

 I’ve always wanted to host a brunch. I see sunshine, a brightly lit room, a buffet table bursting with trays and platters of everyone’s favorite breakfast dishes. In my head, it’s always Spring or Summer, but for people whose family members come in from out of town for the holidays, you probably link the idea of brunch to this time of year. After all, when you have a whole slew of relatives in town, you have a lot of hungry people when the sun comes up!

My family prefers restaurants to home-based festivities. Most of them view family gatherings as a whole lot of work, which I won’t deny – it really can be a big endeavor, particularly if one person or a small group within the family winds up doing most of the preparation. So, all of my baked French toast and strata recipes lie dormant on a shelf, while I go to the local diner or upscale brunch buffet instead. Certain brunch-friendly recipes, though, I can make for myself. It certainly isn’t enough to nip my brunch hosting day dreams in the bud, but it does give me the opportunity to taste some really wonderful breakfast-y treats.

Recently, I made a scaled-down recipe for egg muffins for dinner, paired with a vibrant tomatillo guacamole (how many times have I mentioned that stuff at this point – three? Four? A thousand?) and fresh red pepper strips. The muffins were exactly what I was expecting them to be – hot, spongy, savory, and full of potential. They were also stupid easy, and I use that adverb because they took maybe two minutes to prep. Granted, it would take a little bit longer to make enough for a larger group, and if you need to slice and dice too many filling ingredients that could tack on a few more minutes, but ultimately you can have these in the oven in minutes flat. Imagine that – a recipe that only requires you to be disengaged from your guests for a handful of minutes.

Now, I messed around with the recipe just a little bit. I couldn’t help it. First, I blanked and completely forgot to add in the egg whites, so I just had 1 whole egg in mine – still, I thought the volume was fine so you might even be able to stretch the recipe further based on that. I used chopped onion instead of scallions, 1 ½ tablespoons of strong cheese instead of 2 ½ tablespoons, and half of a sausage link instead of bacon. I also pooled my two muffins into one ramekin and baked in the toaster oven. After about 22 minutes I was able to just pop it right out of the dish and dig in! Below is the recipe exactly how I made it, but don’t let that box you in. I chose not to add vegetables because I knew I was going to be eating red pepper strips and guacamole on the side, but use whatever meat, vegetables, herbs, and flavorings you want!

One of my favorite things to do when I’m cooking for myself is to make a dinner out of one or two appetizers. It’s almost like my own little version of tapas. In this way, I’m able to sample a bunch of different foods without having too much of any one thing leftover,  I can keep things a little lighter, and I get to try out all of those appetizers that I’ve been dying to make but never have a reason to make them.

Over the next week or two, though, I know many people will have a reason to make various appetizers, and if you’re still trying to figure out what to make, please make these “crustless pizza bites.” They are insanely good, and a really healthy way to start off any party. Appetizers can be a health-conscious person’s downfall, but if you make careful choices, they really don’t have to be all that bad. Take these, for example – you basically roast some tomatoes to within an inch of their lives and top them with a tiny amount of part-skim (or not!) ricotta cheese. Aside from the nutrients you inevitably lose from the roasting, this recipe is practically saintly. And, it really does taste exactly like a crustless pizza – and I love a good pizza, so I wouldn’t joke around about that.

Seriously, make these as soon as you can, even if you aren’t looking for an appetizer; I paired them with a batch of roasted cauliflower (reminded me of tater tots – talk about a healthified childhood throwback meal!) and was a very happy camper.

To help wash the bitter taste from your mouths after yesterday’s post about broccoli rabe, I have a very sweet cookie recipe for you. It’s about time, after all – I’m just about the only food blogger who hasn’t devoted every day from Thanksgiving to New Year’s to dessert, which is shocking based on my relentless sweet tooth.

I’m calling these my Mr. Good Cookies, because I used a combination of Mr. Goodbars and Hershey’s Special Dark bars (both leftover from Halloween) in them. The recipe calls for you to use chopped up whatever-you-have-on-hand, so much like the blondie-brownie-candy-pie from a little while back, this is a good base recipe to know about, altered according to what’s in your pantry or what leftovers you may have lying around from the last party or what-have-you that you had.

I slightly reduced the amount of butter by 2 1/3T. Considering there’s still close to 2 ½ sticks in it, I wouldn’t call this a health modification. I realized too late that I was out of butter, my roommate agreed to take me to WaWa (think: glammed up 7Eleven) but not an actual supermarket, and when I got there I was faced with a $3.00 price sticker for half a pound. Now, I’m not a price guru; I really don’t know how much a lot of staple foods cost, though I know I should, but I do know that a pack of butter should not be that much. I just couldn’t justify spending $6.00 for 4 sticks of butter, and I knew that if I got 2 sticks I’d be pretty close to what I needed, so I went with it.

I also used this Stevia product that I recently won on a giveaway instead of the granulated sugar. Again, there’s still a hefty amount of regular brown sugar in the recipe so this isn’t a sugar free product, but it did cut the calories significantly and lowered the glycemic index. The product that I used was called More Fiber by NuNaturals, and it’s the first of many products of theirs that I have tried. I’ll have to test out their plain stevia, extracts, vanilla, etc. at some point, but the nice thing about the More Fiber is that you can use it in a 1:1 ratio to sugar because it’s been bulked up with fiber. I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about NuNaturals or stevia in general. I just have my doubts that it’s really as natural and unprocessed as they say it is, plus it’s wildly expensive (about 7 times the price of regular sugar by weight after taking into account the fact that it weighs less so an equal amount should last longer; just strictly speaking numbers, it’s actually 10 times the price). I’ll have to do more experiments and research before I come to any definite conclusions about which sweetener I’ll wind up using for baking. One of my professors recommended barley malt and rice honey as natural sweeteners, so I definitely want to look more into those, too. In the end there has to be something better than highly processed white sugar!

But ok, you’re not necessarily here to talk sugar or convenience store mark ups. You’re here because I promised you cookies – no, not just cookies, cookies with crushed up candy bars in them. These cookies were big hits in my apartment! They were easy to make, though I definitely recommend digging in with your hands to mix them most efficiently and quickly. They didn’t spread during baking, but as I’ve never made them with granulated sugar, I can’t tell if this is just a side effect of the stevia swap, since sugar is one of the main culprits when it comes to baked goods that spread. Judging by the pictures in the original post, this is definitely what happened. The fact that they retained most of their shape, though, meant that they were soft in the middle, kind of pillowy. They had a comforting, familiar sweetness to them, too.

The only downside that I could discern was that because I chose to use two different candy bars and wasn’t super anal about even distribution, some cookies had more of a dark chocolate edge, while others featured the milk chocolate and peanut combination more prominently, and still others didn’t have much in the way of candy bars at all. Still, I really liked them, my roommates really liked them, and my mom really liked them (though she detected a mildly bitter aftertaste, which can only be a result of the stevia, though the product claims it won’t do that; I didn’t notice the aftertaste even when looking for it, but I might just not be sensitive enough to it).

I’d like to juxtapose the enjoyable sweetness of yesterday’s post with a decidedly more bitter one today. Maybe, if you’re lucky, tomorrow I’ll even tell you about the candy bar cookies that I made the other week, as a sort of dessert chaser to this post.

Earlier in the semester, I made broccoli rabe for the first time, and I now have to say that this is definitely not a veggie for the little ones. Start them out on carrots, sweet peppers, squash before you attempt to put this bitter green on their plate. It’s a really good dish, plus it’s easy and fast to make – you just need to be able to appreciate the bitter flavor components of a food. I might like it even more with a dash of lemon juice and/or zest tossed in at the end to perk things up a little bit, but it isn’t entirely necessary.

If you’ve never tried broccoli rabe, give it a shot sometime. It may not be for everyone but it’s a nice change of pace from the vegetable rut that some people get in, sticking to the same safe few that they know for certain they like. But if we’re being honest here, I still have a soft spot for actual broccoli, and even the maturity I feel for being able to appreciate its younger brother (Rabe) from time to time can’t trump that.

Today is National Maple Syrup Day, but to be perfectly honest, I was able to get a little bit more excited about National Chocolate Covered Anything Day (yesterday) and National Cupcake Day (the day before that). It isn’t that I don’t love maple syrup – I do; in fact, it’s one of the sweeteners that I don’t get totally uptight about using. However, it’s still a sugar, and you know me – I like to keep it to a minimum. I’m definitely not the kind of person who drowns her pancakes in the stuff.

That being said, give me a drizzle of it, a subtle hint of maple sweetness, and you’ll see me smile (unless it’s the fake stuff – I stopped loving good ‘ole Aunt Jemima when I left my teenage years, sadly). That’s why I’m happy to be able to share with you this pear and quinoa salad today, because although it does use maple syrup for a light dressing, it’s very demure and not at all capable of putting you into a sugar coma. I made it for a Thanksgiving social that I went to while at school, and everyone loved it! It would also make a pretty nice meal all on its own in the warmer months, but seeing as how winter is settling in for the long haul, let’s just think of it as a warm, comforting side dish for now.