Roasted cauliflower

A crucial part of revamping my eating this year was breaking out of the broccoli-carrots-green beans rut and challenging myself to try out veggies that I've never really been into before. One of the biggest successes was cauliflower. I'm still testing out different ways of using it, but this has become one of my go-to meals this year.

Roasting vegetables in general has been a revelation - so easy, and the results are (almost) always yummy.

For the cauliflower, I usually break up a half a head, toss with about a teaspoon of olive oil and some salt and throw it in at 425 for about 40 minutes. You want to stir once or twice so that it all gets nicely charred. It's delicious. And despite the fact that it's really a tiny bit of oil, it somehow manages to hit that greasy fried food craving.

Occasionally I'll throw in a bunch of broccoli along with it, or zucchini (added to the pan about 10 minutes in), but most of the time I'll do the cauliflower for about 25 minutes and then add one of those frozen fish filets for the last 15 - 20 and there's dinner.

(Hint - the Gorton's salmon or tilapia filets are much better than their generic "fish" variety, though usually a little pricier.)

Quick ravioli with tomato sauce

I don't eat a ton of pasta these days, so I've found myself going through an unfun pattern w/r/t pasta sauce. To wit: cook pasta, open jar of sauce, use approximately 1/8 of it, cook more pasta, grab jar of sauce from fridge, realize it's been several months and the sauce is crusty and ugh and have to go back to the drawing board.

Waste of money, food and fridge space. Yay!

So this time I went a better route - threw together a quick sauce from scratch instead of popping open the jar. I've done this once or twice before and the end result is the same - why the hell do I ever buy sauce in the first place?

Super simple and easy. Sauteed garlic in olive oil, add a can of tomatoes* salt, pepper, stir and smush at a simmer for a few minutes. Add fresh basil and toss with pasta. I also browned some (Tofurkey) sausage and threw that in. OMG the yum. So fresh tasting and much more satisfying than bought sauce and really not that much more trouble.

(*I've heard that whole canned tomatoes have better flavor than diced. Something about extra additives they use to keep the diced from turning into mush. Diced is what I had, so diced is what I used. Maybe next time I'll try the whole ones. )

Chocolate cookies

Cookies!

So I have these peppermint hersey's kisses, right? Well, actually I also had these peppermint Andes Candies crumbles that I wanted to use up to start with but they were nast. So, the kisses. What to do with them?

Nothing apparently. This started out as a recipe for espresso peppermint cookies and turned into this:

I don't even know.

But damn, they're good.

1/2 cup unsalted butter -- softened
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 3/4 cup total flour and cocoa. I used about half and half, with the cocoa split between regular and dark

Note: I sprinkled some kosher salt on top before baking because it seemed like a good idea. Not actually all that great. (Though it was excellent on the raw dough!)

Bake at 375 for about 8-9 minutes - you don't want to overbake. Crispy chewy goodness.

Chicken tamale pie

I have a ton to catch up on, but let's go with something new. I picked up one of those grocery roasted chickens a few nights ago, and wanted to do something with some of the remains.

I've only bought a couple of these before, and I'm not sure I'm totally sold. The skin is good, but I don't see a lot of flavor. Homemade can be done a lot better.

So far, based on a sample of like, three, my pattern is this. Get chicken home, eat a leg and pick at the breast. Yum. I'm excited about the first bits, and excited about making stock from the carcass. It's the middle part I have some trouble with - what to make with the meat? I don't actually eat a lot of meat dishes, and some of the old family ones I remember aren't really what I want to be eating these days. (The white chicken enchiladas where the sauce is - in it's entirety - a pint of heavy cream poured over the pan; the chicken-rice casserole, which I adore, but requires having ingredients on hand I don't usually have, etc.)

Anyhoo. It wasn't easy coming up with what to do, but I ended up with a winner.

Based on an Eating Well recipe for tamale pie that uses toasted corn, black beans , etc. Inspired by (see above) is probably a better word though, since it really just gave me the idea. I wasn't really sure it was going to mesh this time, but it seriously did. Here's what resulted:

Filling:

Sauteed an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic

Added:

A good couple of handfuls of shredded chicken
4 or 5 sliced chipotles
A few good sized spoonfuls of the adobo sauce from the can
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can black beans
Some hefty shakes of Cholula
Salt and pepper

Topping:

1 cup cornmeal stirred into 2 cups boiling, heavily salted water.

Layer filling in dish, top with thickened cornmeal and smooth out, topped with a good couple of handfuls of (in this case reduced fat but I don't really recommend it) cheese.

In the over for half an hour or so and nom.

New blog, hey!

This is something I've been intending to do for some time. I've always cooked and been interesting in food and cooking generally. But after some challenging times recently, I realized I had largely lost the habit and the interest. So I started pushing myself to cook more and cook differently and whoa, what a revelation. Over the course of the past year it's helped me reclaim my kitchen, my body, my diet and frankly, a lot of my interest in life. Not to mention discovering a lot of new favorites.

What I haven't done is much in the way of recording all this. For a while I saved some recipes and ideas to delicious, but really, I tend to go off recipe by about the the third ingredient line most of the time. So while I can link to a recipe or two that might have been an inspiration, it's not really reflective of what I actually did.

So, this. I'm expecting a lot of recipes, some general food musings or questions, and some not very impressive photography. Who knows? We'll see where this goes.