Linden's healthy sweet potato and black bean salad

So now to break the trend of unhealthy foods. After a year of not worrying about how much I eat, I've been chubbing up a bit, and have to slim down. So I am, along with the pork ragu, beginning a series of Healthy Lunches that are filling and don't have the Too Much Sugar problem.

So, to start, a sweet potato and black bean salad. (It has the added benefit of being super cheap, although it takes a little while to put together.)

Also, the benefit of being super pretty.

I roast the sweet potatoes, cook the black beans (in my case, from dried), and then throw them in a bowl once slightly cooled. I add some chopped tomato, threw in a handful of chopped cilantro, and squeeze a lime over it. Yum yum.

Linden's Curry Puffs

So I have just finished my intership, and it's time to try and work through a little backlog of cooking I did over the course of it. While I'm trying to progress towards a healthier diet, I often slip a little - right now, I'm really wanting onion rings for some reason...

A few months ago (before christmas) I decided I really wanted curry puffs. So I made my dough (I tried an all-oil crust, which I think I didn't quite do properly, as it was very crumbly and difficult to work with) and made my filling. The cat came to investigate, and I had to shoo him out, because he is very sneaky.

Post-shooing, I rolled out my dough and filled the puffs (they never fit as much filling as I think, and I try to overfill because there's so much filling and so little pie crust), and crimp them closed with a fork.

Pop them in the oven for a while, and...yum yum.

Linden's Green Curry Pasta

You know, when I first arrived in England and started cooking with English people, (yeah, English people like my boyfriend) I concluded that there are some really deplorable things about English cooking. I mean, for the older generation, there's the fact that pasta seems foreign. It's potatoes all the way. For the younger one, it's the use of butternut squash in Indian curries, and tuna with tomato sauce on pasta (the latter, I admit, is probably a combination of studential status and terrible cooking skills, which we can't entirely blame on the citizenship, I remember the not-too-distant past when Xan's meal de force was fried eggs).  And then there's the fact that every pub in the country seems to have the same ten things on their menu, maybe with one "asian" dish to set them apart, which tends to be an indian or thai "fusion" curry - which is to say, served with pasta.

And originally I seriously objected to the idea on the grounds that Asia meant its food to be served with rice, and we should eat it the way it was meant to be eaten, but now, I sometimes find myself with leftover curry on hand, and no rice, and leftover pasta, and I think, "maybe just this once, I don't have to tell anyone about it..."

But I have decided to be honest with myself and own up to my non-snooty ways. I really like green curry with bowties. It's also pretty good with spaghetti.

I am not even going to try to justify this.

Linden's quiches, crusty or crustless

Good try, Xan, but you're going to have to wake up earlier than that to fool me! I've watched Ratatouille and No Reservations, so I think I know what happens in a proper chef's kitchen.

A proper chef's kitchen.

Of course these, days, it's just me cooking so I can't put any of that into practice. I know, you're thinking, "maybe she needs a pet!" but we have one, and far from helping me cook, he steals my food. One time, I put a scone out on my desk and went to make tea, and by the time I had, the cat had snuck into my room, a No Cat Zone, and jumped up on my desk and stolen my scone! I caught him walking out of my room with the whole thing hanging out of his mouth. So I'm not taking the risk of a pet, and I'll just keep cooking on my own for a little while longer.

But before I start all my cooking for the day I'm going to try and work through some of my backlog. This one is about quiche, which I know people don't really like for a variety of reasons, but I do, and it is super easy to make, so it happens a lot here.

Alas, the most delicious quiches involve bacon, which is solidly in the no-eat-zone, and while I can justify a little bit of it occassionally, I can't excuse a whole week of constant baconing (it's the nitrates, you can't trust them).

So instead, broccoli, which is much healthier, and vegetablarianer, than bacon. Swap in skim milk for the cream, add lots of cheddar to that, and delicious whole-wheat pie crust and you have a super-delicious weekful of lunches.

Plus, with the leftover pie crust, you can make proper pie! (Mm, look at all that rustic whole-wheat pie crust. (Don't be fooled by it's slightly darker color, that is not overcooking but wheaty goodness!))

If you are feeling lazy, you can leave out the pie crust entirely, and just have the delicious eggy cheesy bit. (This was a more recent go, the result of my lazy weeknightness and a leftover head of broccoli that wanted eating.

Well, I think I am willing to concede the the deboning of a chicken is a win for Xan in the "Impressive" category.

Now, on to more important things, like me. I spent, as I often do on Sundays (well, actually I usually do it on Friday nights or Saturdays, but this week I was in the lab all day and evening Friday and Saturday, so it got delayed until this morning), a little while trying to decide what I was going to cook for dinner and leftovers lunches for the week. I was initially thinking beouf bourgignon (or however they spell that, how many letters do they need?), but wasn't really up for all that meat, so I pingponged between different cuisines and meats and recipe sources, until I came upon one that sounded really good: Butternut squash and caramelized onion pie with biscuit base.

Perfect, for it is turning slightly colder and more than slightly damper (also today, I demolded my room), and because it will feel healthy and virtuous all week long (Papa initially didn't believe me, for it had biscuit crust, but I triumphantly informed him that my biscuit crust is made with milk instead of butter, which makes this dinner practically fat free, aside from the gruyere sprinkled on the top.

And it may seem like a lot of cheese, but my pie dish (le creuset, $16 on sale, I am occassionally an awesome shopper) is about two inches deep, so there's a lot of squash under that little layer of cheese:

It turned out surprisingly delicious; next time, I will probably change a few things, but I think Butternut Squash will likely be on the menu more in the coming months (especially given how inexpensive it is during the winter.) Now, I'm going to go to bed so that I can wake up early tomorrow morning and go into work and get more done.

Linden's steak and rolls and, and as they say in England, veg, and chocolate!

When I'm at school, I rarely have red meat. (Although in fairness, I did have both chili and tacos last week...) But mostly, my diet consists of chicken, sometimes fish, the occassional pork chop, and wegetables (and sometimes shocking things like lentils, which I acquired a taste for during my days of darkness, when I acquired a taste for almost everything I was allowed to eat.) . And then I wake up one morning and think, enough of this stuff, I want some red meat. Red meat! And then about a week later I actually get around to cooking some.

And sometimes, I miss all the delicious home dinners, so I try and steal one. Here, is steak, caramelized onions, mushrooms, and my own addition of zucchini, and homemade dinner rolls. Here, you see Steak! In the poorly-lit constraints of student living.

 Steak! In the glaring flash-lit overcompensations needed in studetn living..

And then, I made a chocolate volcano for dessert. (So called, by me , because as soon as you dip a spoon into the middle to serve a piece, all this chocolate sauce bubbles up from below.) It's like brownies with their own warm chocolate sauce. Served best with ice cream, although I was ice creamless and thus compensated with strawberries.

Xan: Asparagawesomedogs

BEHOLD

I dub thee, Asparagawesomedog!

Yes, that is roasted bacon-wrapped asparagus with steak and eggs all in one of those absurdly good Costco hotdog buns.  A complete breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Top 5 invention right here.

Linden's Linden-sized zucchini galette

So I don't know what other people do with leftover pie crust, but I have this enduring problem where when I make pies and tarts and quiches, there's always a bit of crust left, sometimes lots. So I have to make something to use it up, which is tragic. This time, to use up the edges of my quiche crust, I rolled out the scraps and made an individual-sized zucchini galette:

 Now my camera has forgotten taking a picture of the inside of this, so alas you cannot see its multiple layers. Beneath the zucchini is a layer of basil, beneath which is a layer of cheeeeses. Basically, you combine ricotta, parmesan, and mozzarella (adding in lemon, salt, pepper, garlic, and what have you to taste), spread that on a rolled out pie/tart crust, leaving 1-2" empty all around. Then you add fresh basil, if you are feeling extravagant, and shingle zucchini on top. Fold up the edges of the dough. You're supposed to drizzle olive oil and garlic on top of that, and perhaps glaze the dough top, but that's a bit twiddly for a quick lunch.

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 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 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.

Linden's healthy dinner made of cod and goodness

So for those of you who haven't heard, I am having some food allergies right now. This isn't anything new for me, but I think there's something new that's shown up since I came to England so I'm trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, this means two weeks on a very restricted diet. I'm not allowed wheat, potatoes, dairy, soy, and meats that are likely to have additives (so beef, chicken, pork, and farm-raised fish).

Which basically means I'm on a veggie, brown-rice, lamb-and-fish diet. I have some exciting things from before I went on the diet, but for now, it's going to be pictures of the surprisingly delicious foodstuffs I am making while I can't eat cheese (weep weep weep) or bake delicious things.

Tonight I had some zucchini, sweet potatoes, and broiled cod on a bed of basil. (This was because I had some basil I was planning to make pesto with, but since I can't eat cheese, nuts, or pasta, that wasn't really going to work. So I needed to use it up in something else.)


You may note that deepest darkest is eating toast, which makes me jealous.

Yum! Although if I were to do this again, I would use a fish other than cod, because it was a bit too firm for this method of cooking. Suggestions are welcome - it cannot be farmed fish, so it has to be from the deep sea, which is admittedly not so great for the environment. But I am balancing it by not eating chicken or beef, so I feel slightly less bad about that.

I'm planning to finish off my other piece of cod tomorrow by frying it. Sadly, I can't bread it beforehand (no flour allowed!) but I'm sure it will still be delicious. And hopefully a little fatty, I am struggling to eat enough calories, it is tragic. Six months from now when I am a roly-poly I will think back on this time and be bitter.

Xan: Sous-vide chicken breasts and carrot flowers!

I've experimented a few times with cooking sous-vide in my rice cooker.  So far it has worked out pretty well!

For those of you who don't know, the sous vide idea is to cook food in a water bath at the temperature you'd like it to end up.  This confers several advantages.  First, uniformity: normally, to kill all the bacteria, you need to cook the chicken breast to what, 165 in the very center?  By the time the center gets there, the rest of the chicken is much hotter and therefore dried out.  ick.  Secondly, at 165 even the center is dried out.  I think I used to assume this was just an inevitable property of chicken breasts, but there's another way, really!  Because, if you hold it at 140 for a long enough period of time, the same amount of bacteria will die as if you raise it to 165 for an instant.  And since the water bath will hold the chicken at 140 indefinitely, it can deliver a chicken breast that is both juicy and safe.

It takes a couple hours though.  So you need something that's going to be able to hold a temperature for a while.  This stuff is juuuuuust starting to get popular in home cooking, by which I mean there are currently sous vide machines you can buy for like $500, yee$h.  I predict you'll be able to get one for under $75 within 10 years, and that's being generous.  Pretty much all the machine has to do is monitor the temperature of the water and turn the heat on and off to hold it there...this is not rocket science.

In the meantime though, I found that on the Warm setting with the lid cracked, my rice cooker will hold a temperature of about 150 F.  And by propping the lid open the right amount with a wooden spoon, I can adjust it so that it sits almost indefinitely at, say, 140 degrees (good for chicken breasts).  It takes some fine tuning, of course, but I was actually surprised at how steady I could get it.  I don't know how common this is, sous vide in a rice cooker, but it seemed pretty obvious to me so I'm sure other people are doing it too.  For more dramatic temperature adjustments, turn it up to Cook and it will heat up pretty fast, and dropping in an ice cube will drop it 2 degrees...so it really is quite flexible and functional.

And now, the results:

Well in retrospect I really should have taken a picture of the inside of the chicken...that's really the whole point.  I guess we were too busy eating it, so maybe you can just infer that it was juicy.  The sauce was pretty good, a random blend of stuff-I-happened-to-have-in-my-fridge with stuff-I-happened-to-have-in-my-cabinets.  And lest you think I'm missing something important, the chicken was seared in a skillet after the water bath, you just can't tell because the tomato is covering all the parts that actually touched the pan.  (That said, it could have used more searing).  Oh and also, you may actually be interested in these carrots I just invented.  Technically they're pretty much cooked the same way we cook other orange things on this blog.  But there's a twist, sort of.  I hope you remember your geometry.

Xan's Carrot Flowers (not to be confused with the actual flowers that grow on carrot trees)

• Preheat oven to 400 F.
• Peel a bunch of medium carrots (2 per person?)
• Cut through the fat half of each carrot along two perpendicular planes intersecting the central axis of the carrot. (If the carrots are larger, you may want to make additional cuts, perhaps going farther down the carrot)
• Line a sheet pan with foil and spread some olive oil down.  Put the carrots on top, "tossing" them to coat with oil.  Salt and pepper the carrots to your liking.
• Bake for 25 minutes or until the carrots are soft and browned (the tips may get a little blackened...this is okay/delicious!).  You may want to take them out after 15 minutes and turn them; the insides will now open more readily so try to rub some oil in there if you like.

I have to say, this is obviously a very pragmatic recipe designed to deal with the nonuniform shape of the carrot.  Yet my mother responds by offering me her fruit carving kit.  what?

Linden: Baked Ziti

And for those of you following along at home, I have now surpassed Xan in the name tag department. Dinner tonight was baked ziti (made with ground beef instead of italian sausage, because the English do their sausage differently, it's all "Sage" and "Cumberland", no "italian" to be seen) and carrot sticks and zucchini. I am still working on the three veggies per meal thing, but it's difficult. Unless you count onions, which are debatably full of goodness.



Now in the process of acquiring ingredients for this, I made a discovery. It is going to require a bit of explanation. There's a cheeeeese section in the grocery store, which is comprised of three refridgeratory bits. Usually, I'm either there for cheddar, or for something exotic like gruyere. All the exotics are contained in the rightmost fridge bit. Yesterday, however, I was looking for mozzarella. And discovered that the two other fridge bits contain cheddar. There is a bit of cream cheese on one shelf, and I found mozzarella squeezed into a corner and forgotten, but for the most part? All cheddar. So, you know, well done the English.



And, my plate. I also discovered that flower mode (which my friends tell me is actually called "macro", but what do they know, sometimes I take pictures with a fancy camera and that makes me an expert) works for photoing the papers I have to read for my course. So this blog has positively contributed to my academic success.


I think this recipe was missing something too, like perhaps salt or maybe it should have been slightly spicier, and definitely some parmesan would have helped. But it was still very good. And easy! And only takes three dishes to prepare. (it would be even easier if you used premade sauce. Then, it would just be, cook the meat, toss in the sauce, toss in the pasta, toss in the cheese, cook for half an hour. My way requires onion chopping and other evils, but is delicious and doesn't make me itch, although something is making me itch and I am not pleased about it.)

Now I am searching for a recipe that requires croutons and is not lettuce-based. I have one that is chorizo-based, but I would feel bad subjecting my fellow diners to that one, so I must find something else.

Linden: Zucchini Carrot Bread

Before explaining my cookings, I would like to say that I have pulled even with Xan in the number of times our name tags have been used. Now looking through, I realized that he used mine once or twice when he wanted to show me my bespectacled turkey, I thought I had better return the favor before pulling ahead with the dinner I made. Now I have been wanting to make zucchini bread, for I was curious how it would taste. And, because I wanted to shred a zucchini. It is fun! Much more fun than shredding carrots, for zucchini is soft and shreds with less pressure. However, a little less than one smallish zucchini makes 1.5 cups shredded.



It turned out well! In the bread arena, I have finally managed to cook something almost at the proper heat for the proper length of time. (Although this one took forever, more than an hour. It did smell very good cooking, though!) I cut the initial recipe's sugar in half, and I think I might use slightly less oil next time. Additionally, it was missing something, perhaps cloves or nutmeg. But overall, very tasty!

Also, and this is the best part, the bread looks very nice because of the orange and green flakes in it. Much better than the strange purpley stuff you get in banana bread. (Additionally good is the English equivalent of the name, which goes: Carrot and Courgette Bread. Rolls right off the tongue.)

Linden: Emptying the Pantry, Part One

I have been shamefully remiss in posting up my food adventures here, but so has everyone else. Last night, though, I was on my own for the first time in ages, and I made myself a little feast. I have a bit of a problem in that when I went shopping two weeks ago, I didn't realize I would be spending four days in London and Brighton, and thus bought more food than I can really eat in this time period. So I am eating cooked meals for every meal from now until I leave, in the hopes that all my onions and potatoes and sweet potatoes and garlic and vegetables can get consumed.

Last night, I was working on potatoes and the green beans that froze in my fridge. (Our fridge is currently having some temperature confusion, but we are working through it.)


I did potato wedges, with just a bit of salt and pepper (and some olive oil), put in the oven at around 400F for around 30 minutes, flipped halfway through. (Just in case anyone in the family doesn't yet know how to make potato wedges.) Because of the sad shape of the green beans, I popped them in some boiling water, and then put a little balsamic vinegar and pepper on them. And then I pan-cooked some paprika-coated chicken with lots of garlic, put it all on a plate, and watched tv while I ate it. Delicious!

Linden's potatoes au gratin

Last night, instead of doing my statistics assignment, I made dinner. It looked like this.





It tasted okay, although if anyone has any tips on the chicken, they would be welcome!

The potatoes are potatoes au gratin, which loosely translated means potatoes that smell like cheese, and are made, unsurprisingly given the name, with potatoes and cheese, and a bit of milk thrown in for good measure. The chicken was salted, peppered, thymed, and floured, then cooked in a bit of oil, which spattered everywhere and I had to protect myself with a frying pan. It reminded me of that time Papa fought a bear with a tin bowl. The veggies were all I had, and were cooked a la Vongsathorn, which translates as to the wagons!.

I had the leftovers today for lunch.

Linden's Late Carrot Cake

My cooking habits have devolved in the last two weeks, in that I couldn't make the effort or take the time to cook fancy dinners or fancy cupcakes full of food coloring. I also haven't taken the time to post here, because I am Disciplined and don't procrastinate papers by doing things on the Intramanets. So belatedly, last weekend I made carrot cake (mostly because I needed to use up some carrots). Because of my sadly low-tech kitchen, this involved shredding carrots and nutmeg by hand (which resulted in a wonderful-smelling kitchen and orange tilted hands), and whipping icing by hand (so even though I have been remiss in doing all of my wrist exercises, they are still getting a bit of a workout).


(My strategy is to take advantage of the fact that I live sandwiched between a graveyard and the Magdalen deer park, and include them in my pictures of cakes cooling on windowsills. That in the background would be the long wall that goes around the deer park. Also in the deer park at the moment are huge balls of mistletoe in trees, which is awesome.)

So the main problem with carrot cake is that the icing recipes expect you to want to eat about half the icing sans cake, or put an inch of icing on the whole thing. I compromised by putting half an inch on, licking my fingers, and then putting the remaining the icing in the fridge and planning on doing another carrot cake this weekend. However! The good thing about it is that you get to feel slightly virtuous, because it is full of goodness, like carrots and walnuts.

Xan: Sweet potato fries!

Once upon a time, Catherine did not like sweet potatoes.  As a stand-alone fact, mind you, this does not trouble me.  Economists are not in the business of telling people what their basic preferences should be; to the contrary, we are some of the more accepting people out there.

But combined with some other facts, I start to become troubled.  For one, I believe -- and Catherine would surely agree -- that adding "sweet" in front of a food makes it more delicious.  And for another, Catherine likes potatoes.  Yes, I think we can see where this is going, ah, deeply troubling indeed.  If Catherine likes potatoes, and she prefers sweet X to X, then she has revealed a preference for sweet potatoes.  She should like sweet potatoes even more than she likes regular potatoes*!

Thus reasoning, I knew that she must simply have missed some important information about the deliciousness of sweet potatoes.  And so I gave it to her, in the form of Lin's Sweet Potato Discs.  The recipe is super easy:

Preheat oven to 400**.  
Peel and slice a sweet potato into quarter-inch-thick discs. 
Spread some olive oil on a baking pan, sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper, lay down the potatoes in a layer.
Cook for 20 min, flip and cook for another 20, done.

There.  Simple, right?  And in my case, it turned out to be enough for the required conversion.  But indeed, from this simple starting point, one is driven to ask: How might I alter the recipe? How can I take it a little farther?

Here's my problem: I haven't mastered spices, and I mean really haven't mastered...in fact I hardly know what's going on there at all.  In most recipes, there are lots of ingredients -- often including several spices -- and it's usually hard to tell what's contributing what to the final product.  By contrast, this recipe is simple.  It provides a nice jumping-off point from which to experiment.  I can try things and see what happens.  It's easy and delicious pretty much no matter what I do.  So, slowly I'm figuring my way around.

 
I started cutting the sweet potatoes like fries, coating them in olive oil, and then mixing the salt/pepper/whatever spices in a bowl before laying them in the pan.  I have also found that a small amount of sugar works well (sweeter potatoes, anyone?).  So far the results have been pretty yummy:

Maybe one day when I have gravitated to something really awesome, I will post the recipe.  But if you are like now-me and you want to be like future-me, then for now...just experiment!  Cut them however you want. Put whatever you want on them.  Smaller things should be cooked at a higher temperature for less time (e.g. fries at say 450 for 25-30 min).  Just keep an eye on them, and have fun.  And deliciousness.  Your tummy will thank you.  So will everyone else's.


*I hope this doesn't have to be said, but no, I am not being particularly serious right now.
**Here you have an option.  Fahrenheit if you like your sweet potatoes soft in the center but browned on the outside, Celsius if crispy is more your thing.  Try it both ways, see what works for you!