Chicken Thighs, Brown Rice, Mushroom Gravy & Broccolini

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When Jesse tells me a dinner I cook on my cleanse is as good as any regular dinner, I know I’m doing something right.  Here’s proof that you can cut these 10 inflammatory food groups out of your diet and still eat like a queen:

dinner

1) Brown rice: I always have a pot of this in the fridge or out on the stovetop even when I’m not cleansing, so this was a no-brainer.  I use brown rice as everything from salad filler to a substitute for the bread in a breakfast bird’s nest, so there’s at least 1-2 servings of this already cooked and on hand at all times.

2) Chicken: I shop at Costco once a month and splurge on 1 type of meat to keep in the freezer.  They usually come in packs of 3, so after the first few months we’ve always had a rotation of yummy, organic, easy proteins on hand.  This month we have big 3-lb. packs of boneless skinless chicken thighs, which I defrosted the day before and marinated in a tupperware overnight with olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, salt, pepper, some dried spices, and basil from the garden.  Heated our cast iron skillet on high to sear them, and then once the chicken had released some of its juices, turned it down and threw in half a bunch of…

3) Broccolini: I splurged this week and went to New Seasons, which seems to be the only place in town that carries broccolini.  With all the juices and seasonings from the chicken, I didn’t need to do a single thing to the broccolini.  Just set it in the skillet for the last 5 minutes of chicken cooking, put a lid on top so it would steam and cook everything fully, and stirred it around a bit halfway through so all the sides would get nice and caramelized.

4) Gravy: This was actually totally Jesse’s idea.  We had a handful of mushrooms in the fridge on the verge of going bad, and I asked what he thought we should do with them.  Gravy!  So I sliced them up, sauteed them in olive oil and salt, and then sprinkled them with a few spoonfuls of white bean flour.  Once it thickened and started to get gummy, I added a small amount of coconut milk, to give it creaminess, but I didn’t want it to taste too coconutty, so I thinned it out with water and let it re-thicken to the right consistency.  Even with some fresh basil it was still missing something, and I didn’t want to keep adding salt (which is a hard crutch to shake when my usual vices of soy sauce, hot sauce, or chili flakes are all off-limits) so instead I added a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and it was perfect.  I’ve been eating this gravy on everything all week!

mushroom gravy


Vietnamese Vermicelli Beef Salad

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This is one of my favorite quickie weeknight meals.  The only tedious part is chopping up all the veggies (which I do in a big batch and keep in separate containers so I have enough to last me for lunches later on in the week), but this takes about as long as it does for the beef to brown, so if you do those two things at the same time, you’re golden.

My favorite veggies to use are the following, but any crunchy, colorful vegetable will do:

  • carrots
  • cucumbers
  • lettuce
  • radishes/daikon
  • fresh herbs: cilantro, mint, Thai basil

Slice up the cucumbers very thin, and shred the carrots and daikon in the Cuisinart to save some time.  Boil some water and pour it over a handful of vermicelli rice noodles in a bowl, let that sit for about 5 minutes, then drain the water and let the noodles cool.

In the meantime, brown 1 pound of ground beef in a skillet, and once the pink is gone but the meat still has some moisture in it, pour in some Le’s Kitchen stir fry sauce, then continue to cook until liquid has evaporated and beef is slightly crispy.

As this is finishing up, make the dressing by whisking the following together in a bowl:

  • 4T brown sugar
  • 3T rice vinegar
  • 4T lime juice
  • 2 pressed garlic cloves
  • 1 inch minced ginger
  • 2 minced chiles (jalapeno, green bird, etc.) or 1T chili paste

To assemble the bowl:

Put a handful of the vermicelli noodles in the bottom of the bowl.  Then, arrange all the veggies in little pods around the circumference.  Put a big spoonful of the beef right in the middle, sprinkle with herbs, fried shallots, and crushed peanuts, and then pour a healthy dose of the dressing over the top.

Thai Beef Salad

 


Burger Week

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Burger Week is kind of a big deal in Portland.  It’s this one week in August where about 20 local restaurants feature one crazy-ass burger, like this or this or this, for only $5, and it lasts for exactly one week.  Last year, we only made it to one of the spots, Foster Burger, on the very last night (also the day our little Tuckaluck was born!).  This year we had grand plans to hit up at least three or four — and I had made my shortlist of the ones I was the most excited about.

Alas, this happened to be the third week in a row that Jesse was pulling double headers at work — finishing up at his regular job site around 5, and then heading over to a second house in Southeast to put in an extra 3 hours fixing up a new house for one of his longstanding clients.  I rode the coattails of his work stamina and stayed at the shop until 7 or 8 each night myself, finally catching up on all the multitudes of postponed projects on my own list from this busy summer.

Needless to say, the last thing either of us wanted to do at the end of our day was go wait in line and fight over the last of one of these burgers as they were about to sell out — which apparently was happening left and right this go-round, as Burger Week has gained such an insane following.

But, that’s not to say burgers weren’t on our brains.  In my regular routine (that is to say, when we’re not in summer crazy-town mode of camping every weekend, barbecuing and bluegrassing every night, biking home along the Springwater Corridor at 3:30 in the morning blasting the playlist from my recent half-marathon), I like to read Sunset and Bon Appetit whenever I’m eating alone, take photos of whatever recipes I want to try, and then each Sunday, go through this foodie to-do list and plan my menu for the week.

Usually, it’s heavily influenced by what I know we already have in the freezer, or the perfect way to use up that leftover half-can of plum tomatoes that’s about to go bad, or the fact that this week’s produce run was at Fubonn, the gigantic Asian market, instead of at our nearby farm stand.  Mondays are reserved for errands and appointments, and that’s when I can always swing by Safeway and pick up anything random or extra that might make or break that recipe I really want to make.  Like pistachios.

So it was no surprise that, during this week’s rifling through of recipes, these pistachio-lamb-beef burgers caught my eye.

I’ve never actually made burgers before, but these seemed different enough to warrant an attempt.  The recipe called for some Arabic spices I didn’t have, but I’ve cooked enough Mediterranean food to figure out some good substitutions.  So, into the Cuisinart:

  • 1/2 cup salted pistachios
  • half a large white onion, chopped
  • 1/2 lb. each ground beef and ground lamb
  • 1 egg white
  • 1 tbsp baharat (I used dried harissa instead)
  • 1 tbsp aleppo pepper (I went in a different direction and threw in a handful of basil from the garden, and a handful of crumbled feta)
  • 1 tsp each salt and pepper

cuisinart

That one egg white killed me though — what am I going to do with a single remaining yolk??  Well, as it turns out, I’m going to try making my first ever mayonnaise, as that was all that this simple recipe, discovered through a quick Google search, called for in the egg department.

mayo

homemade mayo

But, to this recipe I also added a pressed clove of garlic, chopped fresh mint from the garden, and a dash of sumac powder, yielding a complex and Middle Eastern-inspired aioli.

aioli

That was totally the right call.

I wanted my burgers bunless, but I knew Jesse would want some sort of bread to make it a true burger, so I had grabbed some whole wheat buns from TJ’s and toasted them up for him.

Jesse didn’t get home from work that night until about 8:45, which seemed a little late to fire up the grill, but he convinced me that these would be better in our brand new hand-forged Blu Skillet from the recent Urban Craft Uprising.

And so that’s what we did.

Chopped up some veggies to dress it with…

veggies

greens

And made a super simple salad: a 50/50 mix of two bagged greens I’d picked up the other day (cruciferous greens and arugula) and coated them with a splash each of olive oil, orange muscat champagne vinegar, and my favorite Friends Forever salt.

salad

Oh, and to top it off, we’d gone out to eat at the Hawthorne Hophouse the other night, and I took home almost an entire serving of their garlic parmesan fries when their happy hour grilled chicken caesar proved filling enough.  So I reheated those in the convection oven (which does a surprisingly good job with fries) and split them between us.

And all of a sudden we had ourselves some serious burgers.

burgers

Jesse loved them the night of, but what really made my heart melt was the next day when he texted me from his lunch break and, while eating them as leftovers (he even brought a miniature Tupperware of the aioli with him to work), he disclosed to me over text that “This may be my new favorite burger! :D”  That is high praise, coming from this guy.


Gnocchi with Mushroom Ragu and Stuffed Chickpea Crepes

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I set out this week to make this recipe for gnocchi with mushroom ragu — the meal was actually inspired by a package of gnocchi I got a killer deal on last week, so I used store-bought instead of the homemade version in that recipe.  Homemade gnocchi always seems like an unnecessary pain.  If I’m going to waste some calories on empty potato starch, it had better be becasue it makes for an easy weeknight meal and only takes 5 minutes to cook!  I’ll save labor-intensive for if I ever decide to make my own fettucine.chickpea crepes and gnocchi with mushroom ragu

The recipe for the mushroom ragu is so dang simple I don’t really know what I can say about it.  I bought a pound of delicious mushrooms at the Portland Fruit Company, sauteed them with butter and garlic and a teaspoon of homemade rub that was a Christmas gift from one of our friends this year, then added wine and stock (didn’t have any thyme), and a few teaspoons of corn starch to thicken it up.  Then topped it off with some fresh lemon juice and cream!

A pound of mushrooms really doesn’t make a whole lot of sauce once it cooks down — just enough to liberally cover two small servings of gnocchi, which was only about half the package — the rest will get turned into something else later in the week!  Oh, but after cooking the gnocchi in boiling water and straining them, I did fry them up in some coconut oil on the stovetop so they were nice and toothy.

This would never have been enough food for Jesse “I’m a growing boy” Hanson’s dinner, so fortunately I had pulled this recipe for chickpea crepes from my Pinterest to try out for this week.  I would never think of crepes as being particularly filling, but since these are made entirely with chickpea flour, they actually packed a pretty filling punch and made for great little handheld shells in which to make mini DIY salad tacos.

The crepes are super easy.  You just mix up all the following ingredients in a bowl, and let it sit while you prep the rest of the meal:

  • 1 1/3c chickpea flour
  • 1c water (I added more so that the pancakes would be thinner)
  • 1/2 jalapeno
  • 1 inch ginger, grated
  • 1c chopped cilantro
  • 2t salt
  • 1t cayenne

After whisking those together and letting it sit, I added more water until it was the consistency I wanted — like pancake batter.  I heated up some coconut oil in our skillet and made these pancakes one ladle-ful at a time, letting them cook most of the way through on one side, then flipping them momentarily to finish them off.  Our skillet has a pretty nice patina at this point so I didn’t have to re-oil the pan more than once or twice.

By the end, I had a big plate full of these protein-y, filling, spicy, savory crepes, which were served DIY-style, each of us adding our own ratio of salad greens, leftover black beans, green onions, and dressing (choices were lemon-tahini-yogurt, or garlic-dijon-vinaigrette) as the filling and eating them taco-style with our hands.  Delish!

chickpea crepes and gnocchi with mushroom ragu


Cheesy Polenta, Black Beans, Garlic Spinach, and a Poached Egg

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This was a perfect Monday night meal, inspired by this post on the Kitchn.  I love how, despite the four multiple components to this meal (which totally goes against my propensity for one-pot dinners!), everything cooks in the right order and gives you time to prep the next thing while you leave the current one to boil/simmer/saute, and it really does come together perfectly at the end.

The real shining star that made this meal so healthy and delish was the black beans, which I subbed in for the chicken sausage.  I had a long meeting on Monday morning and came home afterwards to finish up my work for the day at home, which meant I was home early enough to get this started — a luxury that most probably don’t have, but that’s the small biz owner tradeoff for late nights, early mornings, and unbridled stress.

Jesse had dutifully cleaned up after a little Super Bowl party that he threw here the day before, so our Dutch oven was sparkling clean and in perfect shape for the job.  I started by sauteeing an entire chopped onion in some leftover bacon fat in the bottom of the Dutch oven, along with 4 cloves of smashed garlic.  After a few minutes I added 2 cups of dried black beans, covered with water, and brought that all to a boil with a bay leaf, a teaspoon of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder, and some chopped up leftover charred poblano peppers that I had in the fridge from last week when I made us cheesy shrimp-stuffed peppers for dinner.  After bringing this all to a boil, I then turned everything off and let it all sit on the stove for the rest of the afternoon, not touching it again until later that night when I came home from a long run, when I brought it back to a boil and then let it simmer for about 40 minutes, with the lid slightly ajar.  (The sitting all afternoon effectively was me soaking the beans, just in a more complicated water.)

Cheesy Polenta Bowl

While the beans were simmering, I started the polenta, bringing 3 cups of water and 1 cup of milk to a boil together in a pot on the stove.  Once it started boiling, I whisked in 1 cup of polenta and 1 teaspoon of salt, covered, and simmered — whisking every few minutes to prevent clumping.  Once it had thickened, I added a big handful of shredded cheddar to the pot and stirred it in until it had incorporated.  I usually save polenta for nights like these, when Jesse does his own thing for dinner and I can experiment with foods I don’t think he’ll particularly like.  But after making polenta like this, I kind of feel like I need to force him to give it another go.  When you make polenta with this much cheese and milk, I kind of feel like anyone who loves macaroni and cheese, has to love this, too.

Cheesy Polenta Bowl

While that polenta was in its last stages of thickening, I got started on the spinach — but we also had a yam that’s been sitting around for awhile, so I chopped half of that up into little cubes and pan fried them first.  Once the yam was pretty well cooked, I added a chopped shallot, 3 cloves of pressed garlic, and a giant bunch of fresh spinach, chopped, to the skillet.  Once the spinach was perfectly wilted, I removed it from the heat.

Cheesy Polenta Bowl

Right about when I threw in the spinach, shallot and garlic, I also brought a small little saucepan of water toa boil on the adjacent burner with a spoonful of vinegar, to poach this egg.  Once the water was at a low simmering boil, I cracked the egg into the water, careful not to break the yolk, and set my timer for 4 minutes.  I think 4.5 minutes is perfect for a poached egg, so once I hear the timer go off, this gives me just enough time to find a spoon to fish it out with, assemble my bowl with all the components (polenta, beans, and spinach), and head back to the stove to place the egg on top as the crowning jewel.

Cheesy Polenta Bowl

I’m into it.


Corn Pasta with Broccoli Pesto, Button Mushrooms, and Lemon Chicken

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Here’s a super easy weeknight meal, inspired by this dish from Smitten Kitchen!

I’ve spent the past year dabbling in the gluten free world, which lately has sort of gone by the wayside because I decided to run a half marathon in May (yes, really!), and now that I’m running 4+ times a week, my body doesn’t seem to care whether I eat bread, pasta, or even pizza.  It’s pretty awesome, and honestly, worth all the miles I’m putting on my shoes.  I made a breakfast sandwich the other day…on an English muffin!  After 13 months of corn tortillas and chickpea-flour pancakes, that was pretty revolutionary.  Not to say I don’t still love brown rice (and let’s face it, I’d eat a corn tortilla quesadilla for lunch every single day if I weren’t such a stickler for variety), so a ton of meals I cook still happen to be gluten-free, but I can be a little less strict about it these days and still feel healthy and clear-headed.

Which is all meant to say, we still have a lot of corn and brown rice pasta in our pantry.  Which is why this meal happened.

Corn pasta with broccoli pesto

I started by quartering some mushrooms and sauteeing them in my skillet.  We made slow cooker collard greens for a dinner party last weekend that used an entire pound of bacon — that fat of which I saved and have been cooking pretty much everything in this week, including these mushrooms.

Corn pasta with broccoli pesto

I chopped up some frozen chicken tenders for protein, but wanted a little extra texture to go in there so after defrosting them, I coated them in a simple batter of flour and dried herbs.  Then I fried them up next in the skillet, and set both them and the mushrooms aside on a plate.

Corn pasta with broccoli pesto

Meanwhile, I had been steaming an entire bunch of broccoli in my fancy bamboo steamer (using the pot of pasta-water-to-be as the steaming liquid), which I now removed from the heat (and added the corn pasta to the water to begin cooking it.  Corn pasta — at least this brand — takes about twice as long as regular pasta to cook, so get started on it before you think you’ll need to.

Corn pasta with broccoli pesto

While all that sauteeing had been going on, I’d chopped up a couple shallots and a few cloves of garlic, which I sauteed in the empty-again skillet for a few minutes before adding the steamed broccoli, some red pepper flakes and salt, and a bit of half and half.  This made a nice mushy mess, but looks aren’t important here, because it’s all about to go into the Cuisinart anyway.

Corn pasta with broccoli pesto

Here’s where the true improvising begins.  After a few pulses in the Cuisinart, it looked like super thick cream of broccoli soup, but then I started adding odds and ends from the fridge to make it creamier — some random soft cheese wedges that were left over from said dinner party, a little more cream, spices and salt to taste, and then to thin it out and turn it into more of a sauce, I took a dips into the pasta water with a measuring cup (though I can’t tell you at all how much!).  Regular water probably would have worked fine here, but pasta cooking water gets nice and starchy, especially from corn pasta, so this helped to give the sauce some body.

Corn pasta with broccoli pesto

Once I was satisfied with the taste and consistency, I drained the pasta, mixed in the sauce, and then topped it with the mushrooms and chicken.

Easy and healthy (minus the bacon fat) one-dish meal!


Sausage Sweet Potato Hash, Asian Style Green Beans, & Brown Rice

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sausage sweet potato hash

Well hello there!  Yes, it’s been awhile, I know.  I sort of slipped into a funk there about what this blog is about, and I’ll tell you why: Living by myself, keeping up with what I was buying, cooking, and eating was super simple.  I did all my own grocery shopping, cooked nearly every meal for myself, and always knew what was in my cupboards, freezer, and fridge.  And, sticking to my $6 a day budget really was a challenge.  There were some months there where I had $6 left in the last week of the month and had to invest it in greens, making brown-rice-black-bean-collard bowls for the rest of the month.  (Which, honestly, is not a bad way to go.  It’s actually one of my favorite weeknight meals!  Especially if you have some good hot sauce on hand.)

But, moving in with Jesse has been a whole different ballgame.  I still do almost all of the grocery shopping, kitchen organizing, and cooking, which I certainly can’t complain about.  If that’s the way our division of labor shakes out and I get to sit back and knit while he fixes an emergency leak in the upstairs shower, or cleans the gutters on Saturday morning, I’m a lucky girl.  But, it does complicate things for the purpose of this blog.  For instance:

  • Jesse is a fantabulous cook, but he goes about it waaaaay differently than I do.  He simply wakes up in the morning, decides he wants to eat beef stroganoff for dinner, and then goes to Fred Meyer on his way home and buys every single ingredient, including most of the spices and pantry items we already have.  I’m grateful to have a delicious meal waiting for me when I come home from work, so this is not the battle I pick, but while that’s still part of our shared grocery expenses, it’s certainly not the way I roll!
  • I can scrupulously save receipts from every purchase and catalog them at the end of the week, but asking that of Jesse is a losing battle, so my weekly tally of grocery spending never felt totally accurate, and that bugged me so much!
  • Jesse eats at home way less than I do.  Whether it’s picking up a sandwich from Subway for his work lunch, or Mexican takeout after a late night of bowling, or just the fact that he doesn’t eat breakfast OR leftovers, the fact of the matter is, our household consumption is pretty skewed.  I eat 3 different meals at home (or bring them with me wherever I’m going) most days out of the week, and while they’re inexpensive and made using simple ingredients, the fact of the matter is I’m consuming about 70 percent of our groceries these days, which makes it really hard to really figure out the math of whether we’re truly supporting two grown adults (one of whom can put down three burritos in one sitting…and it’s not me!) on six dollars a day.

So, while I certainly haven’t stopped cooking, shopping frugally, or getting creative with my leftovers, I did stop blogging about it for about eight months!  But, recent requests from certain friends and customers have convinced me to get back into it, realizing that maybe this blog will just have to revamp its purpose.

So, I probably won’t be taking snapshots of all my receipts, keeping a running total, or showing you the breakdown of what each ingredient costs.  But, I will keep taking pictures of meals that I’m proud of, and telling you how I made them!  And you’ll just have to trust that I’m still scouting out the best deals at the grocery store, buying for the future, and getting creative with what’s already taking up space in our freezer/pantry/fridge/cupboards.

This one was a wonderfully collaborative meal, totally by surprise, and was actually precipitated by an argument about Point #3 above.  Every once in awhile, when it comes time to reconcile the monthly bills (which includes all the groceries we put on our shared credit card), Jesse gets all grumpy-pants about it, huffing that he pays for half the groceries, even though he barely eats any of them.  Which, I believe, is really not my problem.  Whether or not you choose to partake, you have a healthy, home-cooked meal waiting for you every night, plenty of leftovers for us both to take to work, and I even make most of our dinners with you in mind (i.e. usually featuring meat and/or cheese, Wisco-style!)

Being able to to share fridge space, grocery costs, cooking, and mealtimes is supremely important to me — and a requirement for me even with a regular old roommate, let alone a life partner.  Even in college, I entered every roommate situation making it clear that I did not want to have the kind of fridge where we each have our own shelf, shop independently, and label our own milk with our names in Sharpie.  Being able to share in each other’s nourishment is one of the most loving things we can do together, and I have been adamant since day one that if we are going to split the mortgage, water bills, and 50-lb. bags of food for our pup, then we should be splitting groceries too, because they are (and should be) part of our life together.

For me, part of sharing groceries also welcomes open conversations about what we’re eating, what we’re spending, what we want to cook together — whether it’s a savory midweek crockpot meal or a gigantic smoked brisket for a party.  It means that if our grocery bill is too high one month, let’s talk about it and figure out why and decide ways together to pare it down.  It means that even though you may not ever eat any of the cottage cheese that I make my morning Israeli salads with, you also get that entire package of Oreos to yourself, or if you want to eat a frozen pizza for dinner one night, go for it!  I’ll split that with you too even if I’m not having any.

I came home from work that day armed with all these arguments in mind, ready to make my case, only to find Jesse had already worked all this out in his own head over the course of the day, and was agreeing with all my points before they even finished coming out of my mouth — the best kind of frustrating.

And, on that note, I dug some random veggies out of the drawer that I thought would complement each other — zucchini, onion, and sweet potato — and a package of chicken sausage out of the freezer where I like to keep random protein on hand just for occasions like this, pointed to the pile and said, “Okay, why don’t you make a hash out of that.”

This is one thing I love about cooking with Jesse: he is refreshingly compliant and capable.  Sometimes I’ll have a vision for dinner, and instead of trying to handle all the components I’ll pull up a recipe for one of my ideas, set up his tablet on the kitchen counter, and tell him to “make that.”  He’s really good at following directions.  The other side of this is that I can trust him to chop up whatever I put before him, add it to a skillet, and season it well by improvisation.  I honestly can’t even tell you what he put in this hash, but I do know he cooked the diced sweet potatoes first since he knew they’d take the longest, then added the onion and sausage, and cooked the sliced zucchini separately so it wouldn’t get too mushy.  Swoon.

In the meantime, I trimmed the ends off of a big bag of green beans I bought last week, heated up some peanut oil in the smaller skillet over medium heat, and tossed them in.  After they’d sauteed for about two minutes, I added some store-bought stir fry sauce — nothing fancy, just some Vietnamese-style bottle of something-or-other that’s been in our fridge for awhile.  While I probably could have whipped up a homemade version of this blend, I get antsy when there isn’t regular condiment turnover, and I’m sure I bought this at Grocery Outlet some time back because it was on crazy-super-sale, so I went for it.  This added some liquid to the skillet as well, which sped along the cooking process by adding the element of steam.  I ground up some peanuts (yes!  I have  nut grinder!  It’s one of my favorite appliances, probably because I love cooking Asian food and about 60% of my meals involve chopped peanuts), and added them to the pan, causing them to get nice and toasty and also caramelize in the sauce.

I almost always have a batch of cooked brown rice already on hand in the fridge, so we just nuked some of that, spooned Jesse’s hash over top, and ate the green beans on the side.


Tofu Stir-Fry with Baby Bok Choy, Bell Peppers, and Korean Noodles

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I finally made it to Fubonn this week, and got a few things that have been lingering on my shopping list for months now (brown basmati rice, Tom Kah soup paste, rice vinegar), and of course a bunch of other things that I can’t help but throw in the cart when I’m there.  I can’t attest to their quantity or organic status at all, but Fubon has the absolute cheapest veggies I’ve ever seen — actual good quality Asian veggies like baby bok choy, not the sad looking tufts of greens that call themselves bok choy at regular grocery stores.  Nope, at Fubonn you can get a gigantic bag of about 12 of them for $1.64, and a package of oyster mushrooms that looks like this, for less than five bucks:

IMG_3421

So last night when Jesse texted me on my bike ride home, already 7:15 and saying he was just getting home from work as well and can we do something easy for dinner, I knew it was a stir fry kinda night.

I had a package of tofu sitting in the fridge, which was just the ticket because it’s been a very meat-heavy week, between leftover pork shoulder roast, and barbecued chicken drumsticks.  So right when I got home, while I gathered and assembled all the veggies I’d be using, I quickly cubed up the brick of tofu, melted some coconut oil and black bean paste in the skillet, and started frying it up.

IMG_3418

I like to cook my tofu for a long time over medium heat, kind of like caramelizing onions.  It drives me crazy when tofu is all soft and crumbly and falling apart — I want it firm and crispy and tough on the outside, but without having to deep fry it.  The key is cooking it in a reasonable amount of oil, with a little bit of salt sprinkled on top to draw out the water, for nearly half an hour, but on a low enough heat so that it doesn’t burn.  Canola oil works better than olive oil for making it nice and crispy, but coconut oil is way healthier and works just as well.

IMG_3423

Meanwhile, I took each little bundle of bok choy and separated it — sliced off the closed end so that the leaves would all separate, and then sliced between the stalk and the leaves.  The stalk takes about as long to cook as cabbage, so I wanted to give it a good ten minutes by itself in the wok before the softer ingredients got added, whereas the leaves go in at the very end, so that they wilt and cook just a little bit.

Here’s everybody waiting for the wok to heat up.

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I got a pot of water boiling, and cooked a third of a bag of these Korean noodles (they only take about five minutes), setting them aside to cool.  Why Korean noodles you ask?  Well first of all, I love their texture — they are thin and super stretchy, like nearly unbreakably stretchy, and get all glassy once they’re cooked, absorbing the sauce better than rice noodles, in my opinion.  And the best part?  They’re made from sweet potato starch rather than wheat, so they’re totally gluten free!

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This may be a thing for the next little while…I’ve been trying to be gluten-avoidant for the past six months or so, but really only half-heartedly.  I decided this week that I’m going to give it a more serious go — not in any sort of Celiac or nit-picky way…I’ll probably still use regular flour to thicken sauces and all that, but I’m going to forego the obvious culprits like straight up wheat pasta.

So, back to the wok.  I started stir-frying the mushrooms and bok choy stalks until they were soft, then added the bell peppers.

As for sauce, we had picked this up earlier this week during a Trader Joe’s frenzy.

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I dipped a finger in to try it and wasn’t crazy about it — it was super sweet and smelled more like barbecue sauce than an Asian stir-fry, so I just started with a few tablespoons as a base, then doctored everything up with soy sauce and a bit of fish sauce.  I should have added chili paste in at the point, too, but I overlooked it and ended up stirring it in to my own personal plate, which still worked.

At the very end, I added the noodles that had been cooling until they had been coated with the sauce, chopped up some cilantro for garnish, and served it up!

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This Week’s Groceries

Safeway 1/2

  • Apple cider: $3.39
  • Pork shoulder roast: $9.11
  • Chicken breast tenders: $7.52
  • Gala apples: $2.74
  • White onions: $0.62
  • Collard greens: $1.99

TOTAL: $25.37

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $274.63

 

Trader Joe’s 1/6

  • Half and half: $1.89
  • Hummus: $3.99
  • Olive tapenade: $2.99
  • Sumatra coffee: $5.99
  • French roast coffee: $5.99
  • Asiago cheese: $3.65
  • Crumbled feta: $2.79
  • Gingerbread coffee: $7.99
  • Horseradish: $1.99
  • Pizza dough: $1.29
  • Dynamo juice: $3.99
  • Olive oil: $5.49
  • Pizza sauce: $1.99
  • General Tsao’s cooking sauce: $2.79
  • Seaweed salad: $2.99
  • Biryani rice stir fry: $2.29
  • Frozen cauliflower & romanesco: $2.99
  • Maui beef ribs: $7.61
  • Lemongrass chicken Thai sticks: $3.29
  • Fish nuggets: $3.99
  • Peanut butter pretzels: $3.79
  • Chicken shu mai: $2.99
  • Tricolor radiatore pasta: $1.99
  • Mushroom ravioli with truffle sauce: $3.49
  • Malabari paratha bread: $1.69

TOTAL: $89.93

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $184.70

 

Safeway 1/9

  • Corn tortillas: $2.39
  • Eggs: $2.59
  • Chicken drumsticks: $7.85 — which we smothered in an amazing rub/marinade during an impromptu grilling party at our house for a friend’s birthday on Wednesday night
  • Ninkasi oatmeal stout: $8.27

 

TOTAL: $21.10

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $163.60


Curried Coconut Carrot Soup

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Well, I totally forgot to take any pictures leading up to the completion of last night’s dinner, but that’s probably okay, since this is one of the easiest soups you’ll ever make.  I’ve made many variations of carrot soup before, but this one had a few new elements to it — inspired by the Esalen cookbook which I’ve been slowly working my way through all the bookmarked pages of, I also added an apple to the mix, and roasted this along with the carrots instead of simply throwing them in to the pot to boil.  I don’t know how much of a difference that really made, but this soup was delicious so let’s just go with it.

The first thing I did was chop my carrots into thirds — nothing too labor-intensive here — along with a cored apple.  These got coated with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roasted in the oven for 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, I did the usual soup-prep thing: chopped up an onion and a few cloves of garlic, and this some some ginger, too.  I sauteed these all in some olive oil, along with a few spoonfuls of my Indian curry powder.  Once the onions were translucent, I filled the pot with broth (using Better Than Bullion these days, since until last night, we haven’t roasted a chicken in ages!), and let that simmer until the veggies were done.

Once they were soft, I took them out of the oven, added them to the broth, and brought this to a boil.  I was too lazy to get out the blender, so I mashed the carrot and apple pieces directly in the pot with our potato masher (an immersion blender is #1 on our list when we go to Kitchen Kaboodle to spend the Hanukkah/Christmas gift cards we received from Dad and Kathy this week!), and added half a can of coconut to give the soup some creaminess.  And because coconut milk is delicious in just about anything.

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For the rest of this meal, I have Jesse and Hollis to thank — Hollis, who brought over some kale which I quickly sauteed in the skillet in a bit of coconut oil, slat, some Balti seasoning from Penzey’s, and a few squirts of my favorite lemon juice — a perfect green side dish to accompany this meal; and Jesse, who swung by New Seasons on his way home from work and already had the chicken roasting in the oven by the time I got home in time for a nice Thursday night dinner with two of my favorite people.

Oh, but this wasn’t just any chicken roasting.  It was a chicken slathered with this.

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He also injected this directly into the breast of the chicken with a syringe, if you want to really know how this went down.  This rub is courtesy of one of my vendors at the Urban Craft Uprising, and it is amazing.  I mean, I even though it was amazing when I sampled it off of a wooden stick at the show, as well as smeared onto a crust of some leftover baguette and topped with brie while impatiently waiting for the carrots to finish roasting for the soup.  But hot damn, rub it all over a chicken and pop it in the oven at 400 degrees for an hour, and you will never be able to eat a regular roasted chicken again.

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This is but one of half a dozen different flavors that we acquired from One Screw Loose at last weekend’s show, and be warned: this may be appearing on most meat we consume for the next few months.

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This Week’s Groceries

Portland Fruit Company 10/4

  • Garlic
  • Milk
  • Eggs
  • Chard
  • Red onion
  • Globe grapes
  • Orange bell pepper
  • Asparagus
  • Cilantro
  • Broccoli

TOTAL: $23.74

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $276.26

 

An Dong Market 12/6 — Jesse’s World-Famous Curry!

  • Sorry, folks.  Every item on this receipt just says “grocery.”  I’ll have to get him to blog about this sometime.  It’s outta this world.

TOTAL: $41.23

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $235.03

 

New Seasons 12/13

  • 5 lb. bag of carrots
  • 1 apple
  • Bulk popcorn
  • Dozen eggs
  • A whole chicken
  • Whatever else Jesse decided to buy…?  We’ve got to have a talk about saving those receipts!

TOTAL: $27.54

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $207.49


Roasted Chicken with Grapes and Kalamata Olives

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Sorry guys, my bad.  I totally meant to post about this last week, and the week got away from me.  Between prepping for our big housewarming party last weekend, and wanting to clear my work schedule for a longtime friend who was coming to town, it never happened.  BUT, this meal was still delicious way back a week ago, and it will still be delicious when you try it out yourself.

Although probably 70% of the recipes on this blog are inspired by Deb’s Smitten Kitchen, this is the very first recipe I’ve tried out of her actual hard copy cookbook, which just came out, and which I got a signed copy of last Monday when Andrea and I stood in line for 2 hours after her talk at Powell’s.

It was about that time of the month for a roasted chicken anyway, and even though this made such fabulous leftovers that it prevented me from doing my usual rip-the-meat-of-the-bones-and-make-stock routine, we’re surviving on Better Than Bullion, and I’m sure we’ll have plenty of turkey bones left over after this weekend (yep, that’s right!  We’re hosting Early Faux Thanksgiving at the new house this year!), so I’m not sweating it.

It all starts with browning a variety of chicken pieces in a pan.  Well no, actually, it starts with me biking home from New Seasons with my hand rummaging behind me in my pannier, eating half a bag of “holiday grapes” (read: gigantic) before I even pulled in the driveway.  Then it continues with Jesse trying to show me how to butcher a raw chicken, using the best chef’s knife we have, which is so dull that it wouldn’t even cut through the skin.  For real.  Thank god for friends who listen, and who buy you the most awesome chef’s knife ever for a housewarming present.  The next time I make this meal, things will go differently.

Anyway, then you brown the chicken pieces in a pan.  I added some coconut oil first to get it going, but once they start cooking, there is more than enough chicken juices to keep things lubricated.

That looks gross.  This looks better.

So while you’re doing this, preheat the oven to 450.  I was working with a whole bird’s worth of chicken here, so it took me a few batches, but once it was all browned, I put them all back in the skillet, and dumped in 1 cup each of pitted kalamata olives and harvest grapes, and a whole sliced shallot.  I put the entire skillet in the oven and roasted for about 40 minutes.

Then comes the fun part.  I transferred all the goodies from inside the skillet to a serving platter with a slotted spoon, and then got to deglaze the pan.  I love deglazing the pan.  Basically, this is just adding half a cup of wine, some fresh rosemary, and a little bit of chicken broth to the cooking juices that remained, heating it up and letting it reduce and thicken, and then spooning it over the chicken and everything as a tasty sauce.  Oh, and on the side I made a pan of cornbread, and some sauteed brussels srpouts.  I’ve been eating it as leftovers ever since.


This Week’s Groceries

New Seasons 11/7

  • Lentils: $6.46
  • Cashew pieces: $10.77
  • Black beans: $3.01
  • Whole wheat couscous: $7.00
  • Farro: $6.59
  • Hazelnuts: $6.49 — I was doing some serious bulk aisle stocking up today!
  • Leeks: $0.65
  • Holiday grapes: $6.61
  • Fresh herbs: $0.57
  • Shallot: $1.20
  • Free range roasting chicken: $11.26
  • Kalamata olives: $5.09

TOTAL: $65.65

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $234.35

 

Grocery Outlet 11/7

  • Oatmeal cookies: $0.99
  • Gamesa: $1.49 — WTF is this??  In case you haven’t noticed, I started having Jesse save his receipts…
  • Brussels sprouts: $3.49
  • Whole milk: $1.99

TOTAL: $7.96

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $226.39

 

Fred Meyer 11/10

  • Spearmint: $1.99
  • Butternut squash: $3.18
  • Penne pasta: $2.79
  • Limes: $4.25 — Yes, this is a lot of limes.  Our signature cocktail for the housewarming party revolved around a homemade key lime syrup
  • Avocado: $0.88 — for a veggie sandwich I made on Dave’s Killer Bread, to present to a famished friend when she got off the bus from Vancouver
  • Garlic: $0.34
  • Apple fritter: $0.69 — for Jesse, who was feverishly finishing the paint job in the dining room when I got home, with T minus five hours to go until the party started
  • Pears: $3.87
  • Panko breadcrumbs: $3.69
  • Sherry vinegar: $2.69
  • Red onion: $0.73

TOTAL: 31.96

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $194.43

 

Portland Fruit Company 11/12

  • Kale
  • Yellow onion
  • Fresh dill
  • Cucumbers
  • Brussels sprouts
  • Roma tomatoes
  • Red cabbage

TOTAL: $11.31

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $183.12

 

Grocery Outlet 11/13

  • Strawberry yogurt: $1.49
  • Half and half: $2.39
  • 2 cans artichoke hearts: $4.58
  • Cottage cheese: $2.39
  • Mozzarella/Parmesan cheese blend: $1.99
  • Goat cheese crumbles: $2.99 — to make Smitten Kitchen’s butternut squash salad, which was a huge hit at the party.
  • 2 blue brie wedges: $5.98
  • 2 bottles Santa Cruz sparkling orange juice: $3.58

TOTAL: $18.70

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $164.42