food forethought

- Slice of brie (half off at Kroger)

- 1 Mary’s Gone Cracker (that are now GONE from my dad’s pantry)

- A tiny bit of my grandfather’s amazing and homemade mayhaw jelly

Mmmmm.

To preface this post, I would like to say that somehow I haven’t been grocery shopping in weeks—I’ve just been managing to use alllll of my produce and also used a lot of canned/boxed food that I had forgotten about. SO I woke up this morning and knew that today was the day—the day to buy groceries.

After spending way too much time at the store (as usual), I came home and was craving something spicy (as usual). I decided I wanted to make a simple salad and some form of potatoes and add in not necessarily a lot of different spices but a wide variety of spicy tastes. What I ended up doing was making a vinaigrette (inspired by one my mom often makes) with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, honey, salt&pepper, some minced french garlic and a little bit of finely chopped red jalapeño, with the garlic and the red jalapeño (which I prefer to green) adding the twist of hotness with the honey still making it fairly tame. I also chopped up a little bit of dried rosemary recently bequeathed to me by my dear roommate Katharine, which I think made it a little less typical mix of flavors.

For the salad, I just used spinach, quartered grape tomatoes, and minced a single pearl onion, put on the dressing and then a little feta on top of that. I then added some rosemary and drizzled the delicious dressing on top. To prepare the potatoes, I chopped them, boiled them with some garlic, and before mashing them I added some olive oil, butter, a little milk and some more rosemary. Perfect! I enjoyed this meal with a classy glass of water and a fancy glass of cranberry juice— what could be better?

Overall, the dinner was a success—I’ll definitely be using the vinaigrette recipe again, maybe playing with the proportions a little bit (it was a little oily), and I think that next time I should use a different type of potato for the mashed potatoes (although they were still delicious). What I enjoyed about this meal is that I didn’t do anything revolutionary but still managed to tweak the flavors and ideas of basic dishes to create a special, spicy supper.

youmeandeveryonewelol:

Flags made from native food: Lebanon (via Whybin TBWA)

teehee

As I previously posted, September is National Biscuit Month, and so in order to celebrate I made some delicious and very easy biscuits. I found recipes online, and since most of them called for shortening, which I didn’t have, I chose a really simple one with just flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, and milk. I’m not a huge milk fan, and so I didn’t have any of that, but I decided to go ahead with the endeavor anyway, instead using some vanilla soy milk I already had in my fridge. I made an egg wash to spread on top of them for a little fancy shine, and after the first batch of plain ones I started to experiment with different flavor combinations. I had some leftover roasted garlic and [spicy] red Thai chiles from a couple of days ago, and so i chopped them up and stuffed them inside a few of the biscuits. For some of the other ones, I got some fresh basil from my mini-garden, chopped it up, and put it on top of one and in combination with the red chiles on another.

I think the biscuits would have been delicious with regular milk, but I kind of like the sweetness that the soy milk added, and that same sweetness contrasts really well with the spicy chiles and the flavorful basil and garlic. Soy biscuit success.

On the menu for tonight— roasted asparagus and leeks with parmesan pecorino cheese and spicy garlic mashed potatoes.

As humans have to always have something to arbitrarily celebrate, someone at some point in time deemed the month of September National Biscuit Month (though I’m not complaining). As it is so, I plan on celebrating the existence of the biscuit by covering it in this delicious product, Dream (manufactured by the South Georgian company Blackberry Patch®), and I suggest you do the same.

Check out this new Aloe Vera drink made by ALO®. Full of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals but without any artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives and sweetened with “a touch of cane sugar.” Check out the company’s website for more information.

Lately I have been wanting to make a tomato sauce completely from scratch— without any canned anythings, just fresh vegetables and herbs. So i did it, with tomatoes, garlic, onions, parsley, basil, ground coriander, and some other somethings. With the sauce, I planned on making a sort of faux eggplant parmesan, faux because I didnt have any breadcrumbs and I didn’t feel like going through the process of frying the eggplant, so I just drained it in a colander with some sea salt, laid it out in a glass pan with some olive oil and parsley in it, sprinkled some parmesan, put in some uncooked mushroom and red bell peppers and then the tomato sauce (which also had mushrooms and red peppers in it) on top of that. Then I put in tons more parmesan cheese and a little mozzarella and baked it for 40 minutes at 400. It ended up being more like a sort of less messy ratatouille, and I thought it was a lot lighter than any eggplant parmesan I have ever had.

mine>real eggplant parmesan

Tonight I experimented for the first time in making an olive tapenade, using black olives I got from the Dekalb Farmer’s Market this weekend (which, by the way, is amazing). In addition to the olives, I minced and added some garlic, red chilis, and fresh basil, all of which were also from the Farmer’s Market. I deem the dish a delicious success.