Daria Can Cook – and so can you!

There’s something you should know about me. I like to live dangerously. That’s right; I’m the kind of girl who toys recklessly with recipes’ hearts, tossing aside ingredients and cooking times like so much confetti. This drives Trent wild, and not in the good way. He likes to follow recipes precisely, and I have a hard time convincing him that my substitutions and fiddlings are good ideas.

He’s often right. If consistency is your goal, then messing around with tried and true formulas is not a good idea. But if you live for the highs of surprising flavor combinations and don’t mind sinking down into the scorched, bland, over-seasoned lows of culinary failures, then experimentation can be your friend.

Tonight, my approach won out. We’d planned to do something with our acorn squash, some of our greens, a can of garbanzos, and maybe some potatoes. When I came home and opened my google reader, however, I found a recipe for vegetarian molé from Michelle at Find Your Balance. It could be adapted to fit nearly everything we were thinking of cooking tonight. Sign from the google gods? Clearly!

Of course, we didn’t have pinto beans. Or delicata squash. Or kale or canned tomatoes or regular almonds. We did have garbanzos, not quite enough acorn squash to make the required 3 cups, swiss chard and celery greens, non-canned tomatoes and tomatillos with some added water, and chocolate-covered almonds from Trader Joe’s. So we made do and came up with this:

And you know what? It was great. Sure, there are things I’ll do differently next time (more squash, no celery [what was I thinking there??], less chocolate, even though we used about 1/3 of what the recipe called for), but I think there will be a next time. And that’s what experimentation is all about: falling in love with things whose existence you hadn’t even dreamed of.

What’s your cooking style? Are you reckless and experimental? Or do you stick to the well-lighted paths of recipes?

We’ve been accumulating large amounts of ground beef in our freezer thanks to our meat CSA. In an effort to make a dent in our stash, I made a veggie-stuffed meatloaf. This was my first meatloaf making attempt (though not my first Meatloaf experience – I’ve been know to rock this at karaoke bars), and it wasn’t too shabby. I combined a few different recipes to come up with the following:

Veggie-Stuffed Meatloaf

For the meat layers:

2 lbs ground beef

2 small potatoes, grated

1 carrot, grated

1/2 an onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 tbsp rolled oats

1 egg

1 tsp each salt and pepper

2 tsp soy sauce

dash of Sriracha

For the veggie layer:

spinach and shitake mushrooms (or greens/mushrooms/etc. of your choosing)

For the top layer:

ketchup

Method:

(1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

(2) Combine all of the ingredients for the meat layers in a large bowl. When well-combined, put half of the mixture in a pan (I used an 8” square pyrex).

(3) Top with a few handfuls of spinach and chopped mushrooms (I’d say I used half a bag of spinach and a whole container of mushrooms).

(4) Put the remaining meat mixture on top of the veggies. Brush desired amount of ketchup on top of the meat. Bake for 45 minutes.

(5) Enjoy this:

I think that next time I will use a larger pan so that I can add more veggies. The spinach shrunk considerably (as it is wont to do), so there wasn’t quite as much roughage as I was hoping for. All in all, though, not bad for a first meatloaf!

To balance out this meat-fest, I also tried my hand at black bean burgers. This was another kitchen first for me! I love bean burgers, but I’ve only ever had them when eating out. Following Matt the No Meat Athlete’s suggestion, I used the recipe at Mama’s Weeds. Here’s what I got:

These were crazy delicious, but as you can see, I could not for the life of me get them to stay together! Anyone with bean-burger-making experience have a remedy for my falling apart problem?

I didn’t sweat it, of course; I doused my burger in ketchup and went to town.

Enjoyed with a baked sweet potato. Trader Joe’s tells me that this is a yam, but Mark Bittman tells me that yams are incredibly rare in the U.S. and that virtually everything marketed as a yam is actually a sweet potato. True yams can grow to weigh 100 pounds. Can you even imagine 100 pounds of yam??

Hope everyone’s having a fabulous labor day! Enjoy the day off if you’ve got it.

… make a bean dip and a frittata.

It was a British-isles-type of cool, grey, wet day yesterday, so I mostly hunkered down with tea and books. The little time I spent in the kitchen yielded this:

The green one is a bean dip similar to this one. One cup of white beans, a giant bunch of basil, the juice of one lemon, a few glugs of olive oil, a clove of garlic, and some s&p played in the food processor for a few minutes. The white one is a slice of lactose-free muenster, crumbly from being frozen and thawed. Mmmm.

Dinner was inspired by this post at Tea & Cookies. We had a whole lotta amaranth leaves and kale on their way to spoilage and some CSA bacon leftover from Friday’s dinner, which was these amazing BLTs minus the L because we ate our two heads in two days (woohoo huge salads!):

So we sauteed up our CSA potatoes, leeks, amaranth leaves, and kale along with our fabulous bacon, mixed them with 8 eggs and 2 slice of lactose-free muenster in a casserole dish, and baked them until we got this:

Frittata-tastic! This bacon is out of this world. It’s simply pork, maple syrup, and salt. No nitrates or nitrites, no frightening preservatives. Pure love. I was worried that our frittata would suffer from our failure to add any herbs, but the bacon and the cheese provided more than enough flavor.

It’s still cloudy, but I’m hoping the sun will pop out so I can enjoy it when I go running. Gotta get that natural vitamin D while I can! How is your weekend going?

And on a sidenote, is anyone else having trouble with google reader this morning? Nothing will load in mine, and it’s totally cramping my style.

After yesterday’s mugginess I thought that just maybe the first day of summer would actually feel like summer, but instead we woke up to grey skies, rain, and cold, gusty wind. It feels like October and it’s not supposed to get better any time soon. Gah. I’ve spent most of today in our big fat armchair with tea, scones, and books. I suppose life could be worse.

We’re still working our way through our amazing produce and meat. I’ve been eating big fat salads, such as Thursday’s masterpiece, which accompanied me to school:

Arugula, lettuce, radishes, garlic chives, and parmesan (huzzah low-lactose cheese!) tossed with homemade balsamic vinaigrette. Nectarine and sweet sweet date roll (aka Larabar) on the side.

Trent kindly made stock from our leftover chicken carcass.

Liquid gold

On Friday I left the house for a study date and karaoke party, and when I returned T had yet again performed culinary magic with our CSA collards, sausage, stock, and non-CSA beans:

Words fail me

We’ve made this dish before and it’s been great, but this time it was magical. The broth was outstandingly rich and flavorful, the sausage was tender and juicy, the collards were stellar. I’m running out of superlatives. When I finally got to eat it on Saturday I kept turning to T to exclaim about how amazing it was. The chef was duly flattered.

T has definitely been upstaging me in the kitchen lately, although I did manage to make another beautiful salad today. I forgot to photograph it, but it consisted of greens, figs, pistachios, garlic chives, parm, and a splash of balsamic and olive oil. Figs in salads = love. T got jealous and made one of his own, even though he’s usually not a big salad person.

and these: