Daria Can Cook – and so can you!

As you can probably tell from my lack of posting, school has been keeping me from food-related pursuits. Eats have been simple and quick and have included more than a few dinners eaten in meetings. Blech.

This morning I made an effort to get back into the kitchen. I eased into it with my trusty food processor, which gets an almost daily workout (smoothies, hummus, blended spinach for oats, etc., etc.). In went half a bag of Trader Joe’s roasted, unsalted cashews and a bit of salt. Out came this:

Isn’t it beautiful?

Trent was thrilled; he quickly made some toast for his cashew-butter vehicle. I chopped up an apple, which baked in the toaster oven for 10 minutes or so, then added the apple, a generous dollop of cashew butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg to my morning oats. No picture because seriously, how many pictures of oatmeal can one look at in a lifetime? But rest assured it was fabulous. I highly recommend adding baked apples, cinnamon, and cashew butter to everything you eat for the next few weeks.

P.S. How awesome is Trent for taking pictures for me with his beautiful new toy camera?

Today’s post has a soundtrack. I recommend playing Drake’s** “Best I Ever Had” as you read.

You know a lot of [vegetables] be thinkin’ my songs are about them
This is not to get confused, this one’s for you

Baby, you my everything, you all I ever wanted
We can do it real big, bigger than you ever done it
[Butter] up on everything, other [spreads] ain’t never on it
I want this forever, I swear I can spend whatever on it

She make me [sautee] it till she give [her sugars] up
And I say the same thing every single time

I say you the you the best, you the you the best
You the you the best, you the you the best
You the best I ever had, best I ever had

see this the type of [breakfast]
You got to dedicate to somebody
Just make sure they that special somebody

So this one’s for you, squash. You the you the best.

Songwriters: Butternut Squash (lunch, consumed with pb and cinnamon); Summer Squash (breakfast, consumed with spinach oats, fried egg, lactose-free muenster, and Sriracha)

**Who else recognizes Drake from his days playing Jimmy on Degrassi: The Next Generation? I know I’m not the only one who loves that show.

Did anyone else obsessively read The Monster at the End of This Book starring Grover of Sesame Street when they were little? I’m pretty sure my parents contemplated burning it so they wouldn’t have to read it to me again.

With “lovable, furry old Grover” as my inspiration, I’ve decided to work backwards through today’s CSA eats. First up: dinner. Nothing too fancy tonight – just simple deliciousness. We had some CSA lamb chops, seasoned with salt, pepper, and sage and pan fried:

and Swiss chard, sauteed with garlic, onion, (barely) hot pepper, and tomatoes:

All together:

For lunch I played with a new, super secret ingredient from our CSA: spey cabbage.

According to the CSA newsletter, spey cabbage is a very common crop in Cambodia, but it’s hard to find any information about it in English. It is a cabbage, but a very delicate, mildly spice variety. I made it into a salad along with some of our CSA tomatoes, non-CSA avocado, and the remaining basil-y bean dip from the other day. It was fabulous! Very crunchy and crinkly, but not quite as chewy or fibrous as the cabbage you can find in the grocery store. It was a nice alternative to lettuce.

And now we’ve come to the scary part of our post…the monster! (Hide yourself, Grover!)

That’s right, it’s a green monster bowl of oatmeal!! We bought some lousy bagged spinach early in the week to tide us over until our CSA share came, and it’s slowly going bad in the bottom of the refrigerator. Solution? Blend with almond milk until it forms a green, swampy, goo. Add to oatmeal along with sunflower seed butter, cinnamon, and frozen berries and cherries. Enjoy.

This pic is blurry, but it’s closer to the actual color of the oats:

See, Grover? There was nothing to be scared of after all!

I’ve done a terrible job taking pictures of my food lately. Trent brought me treats from Tartine Bakery, and they were as beautiful as they were delicious. But did I photograph them? Nah, too busy stuffing them in my face. For the record, if you’re ever in San Francisco, the chocolate hazelnut tart is orgasmic. The frangipani tart isn’t half bad either.

He also brought me a bar of Askinosie chocolate (77%):

Uh-maze-ing! No fillers, no emulsifiers, and they work directly with cocoa farmers, paying above fair trade prices for their beans. It has a lovely “green”-ish taste that less processed chocolate often has. As you can see, we’ve already gone through half of the bar.

On the homemade side of things, I’ve been putting lemon curd in everything. For instance, it went in my banana-peach-chia softserve:

and in my almond butter-chia oats:

Lemon curd in oats is a revelation. It takes oats to a magical dimension that I didn’t know existed. And have I mentioned that lemon curd is stupidly easy to make? All it takes is a little forearm strength – you’ve got to man a whisk for about 10 minutes, and then you’re rewarded with pure lemony sunshine.

There have also been some savory eats. Yesterday we did a crockpot dinner. It’s a little weird to prep dinner at 8 in the morning, but it’s fantabulous to come home from a workout to find dinner ready and waiting. This dish consisted of a cut of beef (I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it’s the kind you use in London broil), an eggplant, a bunch of potatoes, tarragon, rosemary, tomato sauce, red vermouth (makes a great substitute for cooking wine!), and water. It was great, but I again failed to take a picture.

Trent has been on the photography ball, however. He made me document the sandwich he had for lunch the other day, which was pretty awesome.

Our direct-from-the-farm eggs, jalapeno cheese, and sauteed CSA spring onions on Trader Joe’s flourless wheatberry bread. Well done, T!

Today is veggie CSA pickup day, so I should have some good photos and recipes coming your way soon.

In blogging news, Chocolate-Covered Katie is giving away a spiralizer! Check out her giveaway here.

Just wanted to share this morning’s breakfast concoction. It is waaay too hot and muggy for oats today, but I went for it anyway. Weather be damned!

In this bowl: 1/4 cup steel cut oats, 1 tbsp maple syrup, 2 grated carrots, a handful each of raisins and walnuts, and a dash each of cinnamon and nutmeg. After this picture was taken I added some almond milk to cool it down and make it a little creamier (what’s carrot cake without a creamy frosting?).

I normally eat rolled oats because they’re fast and super bulky and filling, but Trader Joe’s only had Irish oats or steel cut. I went with the quick-cooking steel-cut, which takes about 8 minutes to make. I really like the nuttiness of the steel cut variety – it reminds me of wheat germ, which I’ve loved since I was a kid. I do miss the speed and bulk of rolled oats, though. I think I’ll switch in steel cut oats now and again to keep myself from getting tired of rolled, but rolled is still my go-to oat.

I like routines. For instance, I run and lift the same 3 days every week. I eat oatmeal every morning. I go to bed at roughly the same time every night. But there always comes a point at which the routine that had been comforting becomes constraining. I find myself grinding through painful workouts, just going through the motions because that’s what my routine dictates. I have a hard time deviating from what I’m “supposed” to do, even though the deviation might be better for me.

This week I gave myself permission to take an extra day off between workouts. I was sore from lifting and feeling a little out of shape after vacation, and didn’t want to go through another painful “must crank out the mileage” sort of run. As small as this change was, it was hard for me to do. I worry that the extra day off will turn into two, then three, then on and on. But as I set out on my run yesterday, I realized that it was exactly what I’d needed. I did a lovely five miler that I truly enjoyed. It was one of those runs where I just revel in the forward motion that my body is capable of, where I keep pushing the pace because I can and it feels good to exert myself and sweat things out (after I got into the air-conditioned gym, that is – it was muggy yesterday!).

I’m working on giving myself permission to do things I’m uncomfortable with in other areas of my life as well. This blog is part of that. One of my worst fears is turning into a narcissistic, self-absorbed, un-self-aware person, and consequently I have a really hard time talking about myself, my feelings, my thoughts, my ideas… I just can’t believe that anyone would care about what I have to say. Why should they? What’s so special about me? I remain convinced of the values of humbleness and self-awareness, but I tend to take these to destructive, self-negating levels. I end up unable to express myself to the people closest to me because I’m so used to shutting down my feelings/thoughts before they are fully formed, since I think that they’re boring and no one could possibly care about them. So this is a space where I give myself permission to explore those thoughts – to talk about me, since not everything I think and feel is unimportant.

You’d think that talking about oneself would be easy, but I’m already feeling sickeningly Oprah-y and self-centered after one post. Here’s hoping that as I keep writing it’ll get easier.

We’ve got a fabulous CSA-centric dinner planned tonight – I can’t wait to post about it rather than about me.

In the interest of shaking up my routine, I made a few small changes in my breakfast/brunch routine this morning. I had Golden Monkey tea instead of Matevana, which I’m starting to tire of (the horror!). I enjoyed it in my new WBUR mug. Woohoo public radio!

Again with the filthy toaster oven...I either need to clean it or find a new photography space

I changed my oats up a bit as well, although this had more to do with necessity than with desire. Our cupboards are looking a bit Mother Hubbard-ish.

In this bowl: oats, cocoa powder, maple syrup, walnuts, figs. I had a maple oat scone yesterday that reminded me how much I looove maple. This combo might make it into heavy rotation.

And just in case there hasn’t been enough linkage in this post, I must alert you that Kelly is giving away Artisana nutbutters! And I mean a ton of nutbutters. Check it out!

Today started with tea and Elvis oats (1/2 cup quick-cooking oats made on the stove with 1 tbsp pb, 1tbsp cocoa powder, shake cinnamon, drizzle agave, and a sliced banana on top). I don’t know if Elvis would like much about this breakfast other than the pb and banana, but I love it. And if restaurants can call anything with PB and B in it “Elvis” whatever, then so can I.

This is probably more the King's style

Tea is a somewhat unusual occurrence for me. I used to be a dedicated coffee drinker (1-2 cups per day), but then I started having attacks of supraventricular tachycardia (basically my heart beat really fast for no apparent reason) and of course caffeine didn’t help those attacks. I was pretty upset, since I love everything about coffee – the ritual of preparing it, the smell, the taste, the euphoric caffeine feeling – but I’ve managed to transition into only drinking the occasional tea. Trent’s parents gave me a beautiful tea gift package for Christmas, which included this stuff from Teavana:

T says it smells like hazelnuts; I say it smells just like heaven. (And for the record, my doctors never did figure out what was causing the attacks and they’ve more or less gone away. I refuse to believe it was just the coffee because I’d been drinking it regularly for years without incident. And now you know more than you ever wanted to about my heart health.)

Shortly after breakfast and I went out on a run/gym excursion. And while I was out, this guy showed up:

Oh hey there. I haven't seen you in, oh, I don't know, SIX+ DAYS?!

Post-workout I made a stellar (ha!) salad and took a great photo, but then my camera ate it. Boo! It was a mix of CSA lettuce, spinach, peas, Non-CSA figs, curried hummus, a drizzle of balsamic, and 2 kumquats. I wasn’t sure if the kumquats would work, but actually the citrus tang went really well with the other flavors. Hooray for odd combos!

I treated myself to one of Amy’s pot pies for supper. They were out of the veggie (my fav!) so I had to settle for broccoli/cheese (hello Lactaid!).

I like to eat the inside first and then pick up the crust and eat it by itself.

I also picked up some caffeine-free rooibos varieties from my favorite local tea shop, Tea Zone. I can’t very well get locally-grown tea in Massachusetts, but I can get tea from a small, local shop. Compromise is the name of the game.

I had the vanilla tonight and it was great. Can't wait to try the chocomint!

I’ve been craving donuts all week. When I saw Lindsay’s (the Happy Herbivore) recipe for Baked Chocolate Glazed Vegan Donuts, I knew that I had to try them, stat!

BUT…I don’t have a donut pan and I don’t like to buy single-use kitchen items since our kitchen is the size of a postage stamp. So mine came out looking like…bialys? rolls? scones? I don’t even know. The important thing is that they are DELICIOUS! I highly recommend them.

Pre-glaze

Post-glaze

So damn unpretty…so damn delicious!