Kathleen's Lentils with Spinach

This is one of the few new recipes I've tried in the last few months, made in an effort to figure out a healthy but tasty dish for my diet. The main components are lentils and spinach, and apart from this, the biggest flavors were lemon, ginger, and salt. The recipe called for way too much salt.

Unfortunately, it was a flop. It tasted nice enough when it was warm, but called for way too much oil, and there's so much spinach in it that what amounted to a points-acceptable serving was really not enough to fill me up. So I probably won't be eating it again. Still, it was interesting.

Linden's Vegetable Lunch

So I'm slowly eating my way through all the vegetables that need consuming, but they're not nearly finished yet! My shelf in the fridge is extremely green. This also means I'm trying out new recipes for green things, which is always good. Yesterday for lunch, I finally finished off the quiche (today, I am going to kill two birds with one lunch and use the remainders of the quiche crust and zucchini to make a small galette), with a salad of roast asparagus, green beans, and homemade croutons.

So this is my lazy cheater's version of fake Panzanella (I think the only thing it has in common with traditional panzanella is the bread, honestly). I think there was supposed to be some parmesan sprinkled on top, but I figured there was enough cheese in the quiche and I didn't need to dehealthify the salad even more than it already was. I believe this salad is supposed to have peas in it, but I don't like having peas in this sort of thing because they are impossible to eat. You end up spending twenty minutes chasing peas around with your spoon, or if you're using fork they might get accidentally catapulted across the table. It just makes for an overall stressful munching experience. So, no peas! It's also supposed to be made with whole wheat bread, but that is not what I had. I had semi-stale sourdough (which is, you know, more delicious anyways.) But the salad on the whole is a good way to mix it up when you're just eating vegetamables.

Also, for dinner, I was ovening a sweet potato, and I added some brown sugar. (Well, demerara sugar, actually. One time, I sent two non-bakers to the store on a quest for brown sugar, and they came back with demerara. I have had a devil of a time using it up, until I realized it went well with sweet potatoes, and serves as a passable substitute for palm sugar.) The result was slightly caramelized sweet potatoes which was a delicious variation on the regular kind.

Linden's Papa's cilantro garlic shrimp

So I had some coriander to use up. It's been sitting in my fridge for just over a week, getting progressively yellower. And I thought to myself, coriander has never been my favorite herb, and aside from Papa's grilled coriander chicken which I, alas, cannot make as I do not have a grill and am not male (we stick to traditional gender roles in Linden's kitchen), there is only one dish that overloads on coriander that I like, and that dish is his coriander-garlic shrimp.

Now outside of the kitchen I do not adhere to gender roles as strictly, and occasionally refuse to ask for directions. I thought to myself, it cannot be that hard, there aren't that many ways to combine these things. So I took some shrimp, and made a little marinade of a teensy bit of oil, a fair amount of garlic (although not the handfuls that Papa apparently uses), a handful of chopped coriander, and lemon juice, and let it sit for a few hours. Then I put some spaghetti on to boil, dumped the shrimp and marinade (it was pretty dry, mostly just enough to coat the shrimp) in a pan and sauteed it on high heat for a few minutes until the shrimp was hot and the garlic browned. Then I dumped my spaghetti in, stirred it around a bit to coat it with the juices and remaining marinade, and dished up. (It turns out Papa does this very differently, by the way. There is precooking of garlic, cilantro is added right at the very very end, etc etc. Mine was very good, and I think had less of the icky cilantro bite, so I am judging it a success.)

Now you may notice that this is not all I'm eating. Indeed, that would be a very astute observation! I filled my fridge with green things this week (tempted shamefully by the sale on asparagus) and now have to use them all up, which means every meal is required to have greenery. (Terrible!) So here's my delicious asparagus tip: cook them in a pan with just a tiny bit of oil, and throw in some chopped walnuts halfway through. They taste super delicious together (I suspect a little grated parmesan on top wouldn't hurt, but I know some consumers of this blog are not consumers of cheeeese.)  and is still arguably healthy.

I also bought store-made bread in a moment of weakness, but the ingredients seemed innocent. So this was my lunch yesterday! Eaten outside my house in the grassy courtyard in the sun.

Linden's Coconut Bread

So months and months ago, I bought some coconut thinking, "I love coconut! Coconut is wonderful! This will get used up in a jiffy." And it has spent months and months in my cabinet (under the sink. for this is the only cabinet I have in my room, and thus many of my bits and bats get put here.  Why yes, this does include my socks and underwear.

I also have a box, entitled the Box of Shame, wherein get put all of the things I have discovered I cannot eat, like chocolate and biscuits and flavored teas and things of this nature. It lurks under my desk.)

However! The things in the Box of Shame shouldn't really be used up by me, but the things in my sink cupboard should. And this week, I thought to myself, it is time to use up this coconut! It has been here for months, and It Must Go.

So in my recipe dredging this week, I kept my eye out for coconut recipes. This one looked quick and easy, which is what I go for during the week, and thus it got done.

Sadly, because I was in a bit of a rush, and have become lackadaisical in baking, I added 1/4 cup too much milk, and didn't realize until I'd mixed everything together and it was a very watery batter. "Self," I thought to myself, "Something is not right!" (Fortunately, I didn't turn into a French nun.) So I added some more flour to balance it back out, but alas this meant my batter got overmixed and proportions weren't quite right, but it turned out okay anyways, as these things so often do.

Now I currently have a problem when I bake, because all my friends have left and there are fewer people to inflict things on. So sometimes, I wander the halls with baked goods in hand, hoping to find some unsuspecting acquaintance to force cookies and breads onto. Last night I got lucky, for my friend Nicole had lured Griff, who hails from my hometown, to the Annexe for dinner and I came upon them in the hallway! And gave them some bread. Which was a relief because their powers combined with my flatmates got it down to a manageable amount.

And now, I am going to clean my desk and get started on work for the day! For I am virtuous like that.

Linden's Quiche

I have been fixin to make a quiche for a long time - weeks, in fact. Bacon was on sale at the grocery story a few weeks ago, and I bought a load of it. Then there were these eggs that were hanging around in my fridge, waiting to be used, and this butter saying, "use me, use me, I am space consuming!", and a block of gruyere. And I thought, right, clearly, quiche is in order. Unfortunately, in my life I am surrounded (here and at home, at everywhere!) by egg haters, milk haters, meat haters, all kinds of haters. Which means that when I make quiche, I always end up eating most of it. Which is okay! Especially because it can pass for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

But for this reason it got delayed and delayed until this weekend when I said, "right. This butter needs to go. These eggs need to go. This milk needs to go. I want fridge space again!" (For you see, my flat has a tiny fridge shared by four of us. I get about 1.5 square feet of fridge real-estate and things that hang around for weeks make me antsy.) Of course, I promptly filled up my fridge with vegetables, so now it is even more cramped in there, but such is life.

Sadly, on my bespoken quiche day, I had a bit of a life crisis in the morning but a very productive afternoon, so as dinnertime loomed, I kept working instead of stopping to quiche up the kitchen. Which is why it is slightly undercooked, as you see:

But still delicious! This quiche has bacon (although bacon here tends towards Canadian bacon, which is unsurprising given the Canadian's brown-nosing habits), zucchini (here they call it courgette, because they never really got over that 1066 debacle, personally I think they should call it the freedom vegetable), asparagus and gruyere (cheeeeese).

Aside from the crust, the making of quiche is very simple. You cook up all your individual ingredients, put them in the par-baked crust, and then pour a mixture of eggs and milk (or, you know, cream) on top and stick it in the oven for half an hour. Actually, I had some left over that wouldn't fit in the crust, so I just did an additional little crustless quiche. Fairly quick, fairly healthy, especially if you subscribe to the Linden school of quiches, which says, No Cream, and delicious! (I believe it's basically the same as Xan's egg contraptions, except the milk makes it less cakey.)

Thus, my dinner the next night was potato wedges, asparagus, and crustless quiche.

The quiche was the last in a long detour into making unhealthy things that were low on vegetables (sadly, I forgot to photograph the curry puffs I made a few weeks ago, which were squarely in the middle of this detour). I'm now pushing my little (admittedly heavier) boat back towards the smooth waters of vegetables and balanced diets. (With occasional baked-good induced choppy seas.) See that asparagus there? Alas, only the beginning.

Linden's Homemade Oreos, from a while back

So I have been cooking a lot in the last few weeks, but always forget to take pictures. But I also have a lot of pictures from a few months ago that I failed to post up. So while I'm cleaning up my photos folder (um, instead of working on my thesis, which is what should be happening right now) I thought I would begin the task of getting all that old food up here.

So I have a problem with icing recipes. They always make about twice as much icing as goes on whatever it is they're supposed to be icing. I don't know whether this is a fault of how much icing I like to put on things, or how much icing other people like to put on things, or the recipe, but fault lies somewhere, and it means I always have loads of icing left over. On this occasion, I had made a chocolate Victoria sponge for my friend's birthday (apparently maybe this is something that often happens for English birthdays) and iced it with buttercream frosting. After the cake was eaten, I was left with a bowlful of icing to be used up. So, I made homemade oreos. Which were delicious.



Specks in the cookies come, I believe, from me forgetting to add the cocoa until the last minute and failing to mix properly. People tried to eat all the cookies before I could sandwich them, but I managed to just about use up the icing. 

Xan: Cocoa Cherry Pork Tenderloin

My relationship with cooking is definitely still in the "novelty stage," where everything is new and full of surprises.  I have never cooked most things, and I am still coming across totally mainstream vegetables or cuts of meat that I just haven't gotten around to trying out yet.

So with pork tenderloin!  Tonight I cooked one for the first time, and it was the right combination of delicious, inexpensive and easy.  Furthermore, pork tenderloin is especially good if you are eternally tasked with feeding someone who is both cutlery challenged (hey, no bones or fat!) and inexplicably likes her meat medium instead of medium-rare (the tenderloin tapers to one end, so there's a gray-dient).

I followed this video recipe from foodwishes.  The pork is rubbed with cocoa powder and chili powder, and served over a cherry-vinegar sauce.  It was delicious:

Yes, it came out perfect on the first time, just like every other meat I have ever roasted, thanks to my innate ability to own a meat thermometer.  Here's mine.  I guess this is just one of those have-it-or-you-don't cooking skills; if you find yourself unable to own a meat thermometer, I'm afraid you will just have to compensate with actual cooking experience and skill.  FYI this pork was taken out when it hit 145 F.

To go with, zucchini and sweet potatoes.  After an initial sear on the stovetop, the pork is transferred to the oven to finish cooking, so I sauteed the zucchini in the pork pan, with a little olive oil, some salt, pepper, and oregano...really delicious.  In other news, I have been cutting my sweet potatoes a bit thicker lately so they will have a nonempty interior of squishy goodness.

Question: What would you serve with pork tenderloin?  To me, a "standard" meal is meat+vegetable+starch.  In the starch category, rice and pasta are my most frequent choices.  Bread is also a good choice but it takes more work and actual planning.  I don't cook potatoes enough but that's on the rise...would roast potatoes be welcome here?  I would say yes automatically except I can't remember ever eating roast potatoes with pork.  Maybe I should just forget my starch and go with apples...

In my accounting, sweet potatoes are somewhere in between a vegetable and a starch; I picked them because rice and pasta obviously don't belong here, and I didn't have bread, and I didn't think of roast potatoes.

Xan and Catherine: Please join us in not celebrating Valentine's Day

I have been busy.  So some of this food was made a bit late for Valentine's Day, and all of it is late to the blog.  But better ever than never.

First of all, I am blessed to live in a household where valentine's day is not a real holiday.  That said, we did accidentally appear to celebrate it over the course of several weeks.

It started with a...what to call this? Let's go with Orange Upside-Down Brownie:

So we found a heart-shaped silicon mold in the dollar section of Target.  It doesn't matter that it's heart-shaped, what matters is it was in the dollar aisle.  And this brownie was just to test our new pan out. Okay?

Catherine also managed to buy an entire crate of probably the sourest clementines I have ever tasted.  In an attempt to fix this, I decided to caramelize a couple of them them (i.e. slice them up and cook in sugar water).  Then I put them in the pan with some of the liquid and poured the brownie batter over them.  Problem solved?  Honestly, no.  The clementines were somehow still sour, and in any case we still had a mostly full crate of sour clementines.  But it was an interesting experiment.

For those who would doubt my conviction, let it be noted that if I celebrated valentine's day, I would have made this cheesecake, not a brownie.  As it is, I refuse to grant cheese amnesty for such a lame holiday.  Incidentally, at the link you can find the recipe for caramelizing your own oranges if you're interested.

Okay, moving right along.  I think the following may be the meal that we just so happened to eat on the 14th, which is a regular day in February.  That does not make it "celebrating" Valentine's Day, but it coincidentally happened to be a good meal so I am sharing it here because that's what we do on Vongsafood.  First, these potatoes deserve their own closeup:

You say potato, I say patata: Behold Patatas Bravas from Serious Eats

I'm pretty sure they were cooked in enough oil to qualify as deep-fried.  Therefore they were crispy and delicious, especially after being coated with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika of greatest awesomeness.  Can't really go wrong here, right?  Unless of course you don't like potatoes.  (Actually, most people don't like potatoes, if you believe Tammy. Indeed, Tammy apparently believes so few people like potatoes that she will actually be shocked if she ever discovers you like potatoes.  I DIDN'T KNOW YOU LIKE POTATOES!!!!!!!! she will cry, mouth agape.  Therefore guard your secret closely; as you may know from one of those unfortunate incidents with childhood pets, small creatures can only handle so much shock).  By the way, regarding the aioli you see on the potatoes: more trouble than it's worth, I think, but it certainly was interesting.

NEXT UP: Lamb shoulder chops? This has probably been my most amazing ingredient discovery in the last couple months.  Watch closely:

Yes, for just a few bucks you too can obtain this steak of lamby awesomeness.  Wait, what's this I just pulled off?  Is that...?

OMG DOESN'T THAT BELONG ON A RACK OF LAMB?!?!? 

Yes, my friends, yes it does. Well, technically no, but as far as I can tell, the difference is mainly a question of how much work you have to do to get at the meat.  Here's the lowdown: Numbering the lamb's ribs 1-12, with 1 being at the front (shoulder) end, it appears that the "rack of lamb" specifically refers to ribs 6-12 (and sometimes 5).  The lamb shoulder chops then presumably contain ribs 1-5 (there may also be lamb shoulder chops that don't have a rib component...I haven't found one yet though).  I'm pretty happy with 1-5 so far; the shoulder meat is more flavorful while slightly less tender, though by far the biggest question is just whether you're willing to do more work to extract the meat from the surrounding fat and bones that are always found in shoulder cuts.  For those of us with sharp teeth and knife skills, it's not a huge deal...and it's not like you should be rushing through a lamb dinner anyway.

If that's not your cup of tea, you can always get yourself some regular lamb chops from either the loin or rib sections.  Personally though, I'm happy with these cheaper and more delicious shoulder chops. I know this might not be a big deal to those of you who have moved to England and all, but lamb is sorta expensive here in the states :(


OK, fastforward to just this past week.  These things appeared on our countertop:

This is the moment in the plot where an improbably chain of events leads to an unfortunate misunderstanding. IT'S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE!  Should I bother explaining how these icing-coated-heart-shaped-poundcake-topped cupcakes found their way into our heart pan from Target?  Should I tell you it has something to do with Catherine's friend Sneha the Indian boxing swing dancing computer scientist museum volunteer first year grad student runner?  It would sound like a fiction.  If I were to claim the existence of any such person -- and I am not -- you would scarcely believe me.  More likely I am a liar.  I will settle for the outside chance that maybe, just maybe, you will at least believe these cupcakes weren't my idea.


Actually, I've been joking Mr. Perkins.  Pardon me, it's my strange, academic sense of humor. In truth, this year I did celebrate Valentines Day: I got Catherine some flours!  Specifically, bread, wheat, and best of all, all-purpose unbleached.  Best Valentine's Day Ever.

My Winter Cookings

I haven't ventured much beyond my normal repertoire this winter--yet. But these are a couple of things I took pictures of. The amazing vegetarian quesadilla that I can no longer make because it's too unhealthy. But sooooo delicious.



And a Texas sheet cake that I made for a birthday... Which went over incredibly well.

Christmas Food

I thought it was high time I put up some of the photos of food I was asked to take over Christmas break!


Daddy's trifle.


Mama's blackberry pie


Daddy's weird nut thing


Daddy's banana bread


My trifle and Mama's pumpkin pie!


Christmas Dinner


Xan's Potato


Christmas Eve dinner


Monkey bread



Mama's Ribs


Xan's Furtada

Linden's dinners

Alas, this little blog has been gathering dust (as, admittedly, most things in our family do, because we are not big on feather dusters). But I know it is not for lack of eating! In fact, a number of us have changed our fooding patterns, which means I suspect there are a number of delicious new meals being consumed throughout the family that no one is telling me about.

Given my deep understanding of human nature, I know that creating a situation in which people feel socially obliged to reciprocate is pretty practical way of getting things done. However, given that the last five entries on this joint family blog are from yours truly, I think we should perhaps conclude that this informal internet structure is not sufficient obligation. However, I am going to have another go, because I am very proud of my fooding.

This was dinner from a week or so ago, during my Cumin Period.


I sauteed cauliflower, carrots, onion in a pan until cooked through (this requires cauliflower in small florets), and then added in lentils that had been previously cooked, and seasoned with cumin, salt, pepper, thyme, and a little paprika and turmeric.(This one also benefits from lamb if you happen to have some lying around.)

And this is from last night, during my "I have a lot of random meat in the freezer I should eat, and also, my veggie-grain-meat balance isn't nearly as good as it was two weeks ago, mostly because I am now eating meat" phase.



For this, I throw onion, broccoli, carrot, asparagus and garlic into a pan and cook on medium high until the broccoli is slightly crunchy, salting and peppering and paprikaing. I then flake a piece of salmon and toss it in paprika and brown sugar (because why not steal from the archives of Papa when you get a chance), then clear some space in the middle of the pan, put a bit more oil in, and throw in the salmon. Cook it until it's at least cooked on the sides but not necessarily cooked through, then stir it in with the veggies, add rice and stir until the rice is equally coated in deliciousness, and cook a few more minutes until everything is warm and cooked through.