Archive for August, 2009

Posted on August 30, 2009 - by Ashley Jackson

It’s a jungle out there

I’m looking into a new digital camera–not that I don’t like my Kodak EasyShare C315, but it’s never taken great pictures. I have a film SLR camera that I still use when the mood strikes me, so I’m just looking for a fancier point-and-shoot option. I think the Canon PowerShot SD1200 might be a good choice, but I’m still researching.

In the background of this morning’s brunch shot, you can see part of my tomato plants, which are overrunning my balcony. There are unripe tomatoes everywhere out there…

Brunch today was inspired by something I saw in the latest Food & Family magazine. The ‘zine is made by Kraft, so every recipe is a shill for a Kraft product, but there are usually some great recipes in there nonetheless. The one that caught my eye was a salad topped with ranch dressing and roasted potatoes, carrots, and onions. Simple, but it looked good, so I riffed on it a little and came up with this.

I cut up potatoes, onions, and carrots, sprayed them with olive oil, and then, rather than simply roast them and add ranch dressing to the salad, I sprinkled Penzey’s buttermilk ranch dressing base on them and then roasted them. When they were done, I put them on a bed of romaine lettuce, then added some blue cheese and a tomato. And some bread on the side.

My brother said yesterday’s bread-and-coleslaw photo looked like a seashell threw up. What’s this look like, I wonder? I don’t care, this was pretty good–although a little dry since it had no dressing whatsoever. I think next time I’ll probably make some sort of olive oil dressing to go on top.

I snuck some of those awesome lemon crisp cookies throughout the day, but I was ravenous by 3PM. I threw a little round steak on the George Foreman grill, doused it in Penzey’s Chicago Steak seasoning, and got to work on some veggies.

With my steak, I had a small salad with romaine, tomatoes, bacon, co-jack cheese, and that little container of Wildflour’s Honey Mustard dressing. I cut up the remainder of my Pink Lady apple from Friday–it had been chilling in the fridge in some plastic wrap, so it was still good. And I had some broccoli, as well as another tomato or two that didn’t make it into the picture and a bit of dip I made from Fage 0% Greek Yogurt and Penzey’s buttermilk ranch dressing base. It was a very Penzey-y day–I need to make another order from them soon to stock back up on a few things.

Since I had my dinner so early, I nibbled throughout the rest of the day. There was some Seven Layer Salad…

..which looks disgusting, but tastes yummy.

Then there were some cookies…

The one of the bottom is one of the other kind of cookie I got at Trader Joe’s–dark chocolate almond. They are SO good–reminiscent of Famous Amos’s chocolate chip walnut, but much better. It’s going to be a struggle not to eat all of them myself–in fact, I might go ahead and take them to work tomorrow and just leave them in my cabinet until the lemon crisps are gone.

I also had a small bowlful of these:

Trader Joe’s mini milk chocolate peanut butter cups! I love what happens when you put these in your mouth–it’s like they burst open and peanut butter comes out.

I’ve had this hellacious cramp in my right calf for the past two days, hence no running. It’s finally eased, so I’m going to try the whole getting-up-and-running thing tomorrow morning. True, it’s 11:30PM and if I go running in the morning I’m going to have to get up at 4:30AM or 5AM, but I had a nice long nap this afternoon on my couch with my fan and my dog and a puddle of sunshine, so I’ll probably get my lazy bum out of bed and do it. I bought two raw food bars at Trader Joe’s to eat before I run in the mornings, since I think not eating before I run is what makes me naseous sometimes, and I have tomorrow’s bar laid out next to my running clothes. We’ll see what happens…

Posted on August 30, 2009 - by Ashley Jackson

Four and twenty lizards baked in a pie

No worries, there was no lizard eating in today’s post.

I do have a confession, though. When I was at Harris Teeter on Friday evening, I bought a box of Krispy Kreme glazed chocolate cake donut holes thinking that maybe this time I could control myself. By Saturday morning most of them were gone (and I had a tummyache), and my Saturday evening the box was empty. This is why I can’t buy donuts, potato chips, cans of soda…I did pretty well with the brownies last weekend, though, so I’ll give myself credit for that. Oh well. On to better things…

I had a late and leisurely sleep on Saturday morning and waited a while to eat (well, to eat anything other than donut holes). When I started feeling peckish, I grabbed the leftover blue cheese colseslaw out of the fridge and plated it because the bowl looked a little weird after a night in the fridge.

I had some of that delicious bread from the farmer’s market on the side. Mmmm. The slaw was good the first time around, but I think a night in the fridge definitely improved it. The flavors of the blue cheese and the red pepper flakes were much stronger this time around.

Later in the afternoon, I packed up my Seven Layer Salad and headed over to my brother’s townhouse, where we had dinner to celebrate his wife’s birthday. I guess this was the last celebration of this sort at their place–next week they’re closing on their new house!

Upon my arrival, I was greeted exuberantly by their dog, Ziggy.

I took a picture of my Seven Layer Salad….

Before stirring it up and turning it into this:Since there was a vegetarian among us, only six layers made it into the bowl–I kept the bacon crumbles out on the side for garnishing individual portions.

In the kitchen, there was this chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and melted chocolate, made by my brother.

While we were waiting for our parents, my brother asked me to get some boxes out of the storage unit underneath the townhouse. I was told that there were giant crickets in this storage space, so no one wanted to go into it (which is to say, my brother ran off like a little girl when I opened the door and crickets flew everywhere). I went in there and hauled the boxes halfway out, but when I reported that there were three dead rodents and one live lizard in the top box, I was ordered to abort the mission. My brother swears there were at least four lizards in the box, but I wonder how he can be so sure of this given that he was hiding up on the deck the entire time?

My parents arrived soon after with the evening’s entree. My mom made three kinds of lasagna–regular (aka meat) lasagna for herself, my dad, and my brother; a lasagna filled with Asian vegetables for me; and a meat- and vegetable-free lasagna for my sister-in-law. There was lots of lasagna!

I only ate half of the gigantic piece of lasagna that made its way onto my plate; the rest went back into the container, which is now sitting in my fridge, waiting to be eaten. I had two helpings of the salad and a piece of delicious bread.

And a small piece of cake afterwards.

My parents gave me a bag of tomatoes from their garden before I left. It’s a good thing I like tomatoes–I guess they’ll be featuring in my meals all week!

My brother currently lives near Trader Joe’s, so I headed over there after I left and spent over $50. For once there were few enough people in there that I was able to look around, so I picked up a lot of little things that I’d seen on other blogs and wanted to try.  I encountered several annoying yuppies who blocked the aisles and then talked about me while I was standing two feet away after I finally just walked between them, and another one who was in front of me at the checkout and informed me that my very full basket was why she always got a cart. So I informed her that I got a basket because the aisles were always so crowded that it was easier for me to navigate with a basket, which she realized made sense. Silly yuppies…

Yes, I’m a yuppie, too. (And I make snide comments about people who push past me without excusing themselves. Ah, hypocrisy…)

A few trips to Trader Joe’s ago, I grabbed a few containers of the Cat Cookies for People and left them on my desk at work with a sign inviting people to eat them. And they did–and those containers last forever, since there’s so many cookies in them. Finally this week I took the nearly empty remaining container and put it on the table in the break room, where it vanished. And during the day or two that I had no cookies on my desk, several people came looking for a snack and found no cookies to saite their hunger. The horror!

So I grabbed two new kinds of cookies for us to try. The first kind I’m putting out are lemon crisps–thin lemon cookies with chocolate drizzled on them.

A little melty, but soooo good. I have a feeling these won’t last long!

Before bed, I broke into the box of Tofutti Cuties I got at Trader Joe’s. These are minature frozen “snack-size sandwiches”–notice no mention of ice cream. ‘Cause they’re made of tofu! Well, not entirely.

Not a fan of tofu, but these were good. Definitely didn’t taste like ice cream, but it was a good taste all the same.

I cleaned my pantry out last night and today it’s on to the fridge…oi…

Posted on August 28, 2009 - by Ashley Jackson

Tell me, O Octopus…

Tell me, O Octopus, I begs

Is those things arms, or is they legs?

I marvel at thee, Octopus;

If I were thou, I’d call me Us.

–Ogden Nash

Well, I managed to get to work by 6:15AM today, so of course I forgot my camera. So imagine the delicious cranberry-orangeness of the muffin I had this morning for breakfast, taken from my freezer and heated back into deliciousness by the microwave….

Naturally, the day I forgot my camera was the day I decided to break from my walking habit and head over to the farmer’s market during my lunch break. I spent a whopping $17 on the items pictured below–though there was another tomato and the end of that loaf of bread as well…

If you’ve never been to a farmer’s market, let me give you a better idea of the cost: that loaf of bread was $5.60 (a price the lady who sold it to me called “ridiculous”–okay, next time I’ll get another vendor’s bread) and the bag of pecans was $3.75. So the veggies shown here cost about $7.65. I got some great deals–the peppers were 2/$1 and the tomatoes were $1/lb.

In the spirit of the day, I hauled this all up to my office so it didn’t get all gross in my car and ended up leaving my phone on the seat. So my beautiful lunch, which I’ve named “Tomato Sandwich, Desconstructed,” is forever lost from view. I broke off the end of the loaf of bread, quartered and salted the tomato missing from the photo above, and had a piece of light Babybel cheese. I wasn’t expected great things out of the tomatoes since they were so cheap, but the one I had was delicious. And that bread–oh my. $5.60 a loaf is not ridiculous for bread with the texture of cotton candy. I don’t even like bread that much, especially white bread, and even I had to grab another piece after I’d finished the first one. Soooo good…

I had to stop at Harris Teeter on the way home to pick up the ingredients for the Seven Layer Salad I’m taking to my brother’s place tomorrow. So I picked up a several other things that looked tasty while I was at it. In fact, I had trouble deciding what to make for dinner. Eventually, I decided to make a stir-fry using the “Seafood Medley” I’d picked up, with blue cheese coleslaw on the side.

Oh yes. The connection to the octopus poem at the beginning of this post is coming soon.

I glanced at the contents of the Seafood Medley before I bought it, but it didn’t register until I opened the bag that we weren’t just talking shrimp here. I mean, yeah, there were shrimp. There was also clam meat, and mussel meat, and that’s not so bad.

But there were baby octopus. And squid.

I’ve had squid before, at the urging of friends who’d cooked for my college’s International Dinner. You know what? Those squid parts weren’t identifable.

These were.

I seriously hesitated at this point. There were tentacles in my colander. Worse, there was what appeared to be a mostly whole baby octopus.

I left the colander in the sink with the cold water running so the “medley” could thaw and turned toward making my blue cheese coleslaw. Cabbage, carrots, blue cheese, some really good “lemonaise” by The Ojai Chef that I just discovered this afternoon, and some seasoning. I bought an apple to put into the coleslaw, but the Pink Lady, she would not shred, so instead I sliced it and served it alongside my meal.

While I was making the coleslaw and my ocean friends were thawing, I had green bell peppers, onions, carrots, broccoli, and snow peas cooking in a little olive oil and Penzey’s Ozark seasoning. Normally when I make stir-fry it’s one whole onion, one whole pepper, and some beef, but today I decided to go with more of a variety so that I could use less of each item. It worked out very well.

When it was nearly done, I dumped in the seafood and cooked it for three minutes.

Eventually, I couldn’t take looking at the baby octopus in my pan anymore, so I scooped it out. No way I was eating that.

When my meal was finished cooking, it was very pretty. For the first few minutes, I used my chopsticks to pick out the shrimp and the veggies. And then I decided to man up and eat a chunk of squid.

And you know what? This was one of the best meals I’ve had in a while. I really liked the different textures of the seafood, and that coleslaw was stellar. I ate it while watching NCIS and looking out my balcony door while it thunderstormed outside.

Unfortunately, it’s still raining, and my dog is being bad. He did his duty when I took him out after I got back around 5PM, but I’ve taken him out twice in the rain since then and he is more interested in chasing bugs and lunging at the neighbor’s yappy ratdog than getting in another bathroom break before bedtime. Meanwhile, I’m being eaten by mosquitos. So he’s locked in his crate in my bedroom for the first time in a good long time, and I’m getting ready to head out to the living room to watch the hilariously bad Wing Commander and possibly fall asleep on the couch.

I hope I don’t dream of tentacles.