Spicy Chicken Schawarma
Flipping through the most recent issue of Cooking Light, I stumbled onto a gorgeous sounding recipe for chicken schawarma. I really enjoy Mediterranean food, but don’t often have a chance to indulge in eating it in a restaurant (the biggest disadvantage of living in a medium-sized city the midwest!).
Read MoreMexican Black Bean Soup
Black bean soups and chilis are great food for the winter, because they’re rich and hearty and the spiciness warms you from the inside out. They also reheat fabulously, for those with smaller households or who like to bring their lunch.
This soup is on the thin side as written on the book (with an extra cup of water), but I like my soups on the thicker side. I’m totally guilty of using up half a package of saltines in thin soups to get it to the consistency I like. The photo above was taken on the third eating of the soup, so it’s really starting to thicken up.
Asian-inspired chicken and noodle soup
I’ve been sick the last week or so, but I’ve moved from the point where I’m not hungry and have no energy to cook to the point where I’m still feeling like crap, dont’ really have energy, but am out of the anything effortless to make (including canned soup).
Did I mention that I really haven’t done much grocery shopping in the last month, beyond one major meat restocking?
Read MoreStuffed Shells
Dinner tonight was pretty simple — pasta shells filled with mushrooms, spinach, ricotta, sun dried tomatoes, and baked with marinara; garlic bread; slacker garden salad. The recipe for the pasta shells (if you want to call it that): 12 (cooked) shells (enough for dinner + a lunch) filled with: 1 C of (skim) ricotta, 4 mushrooms (roughly diced), 5oz chopped spinach (we used previously frozen, so you’d have to wilt it first), 3 sundried tomatoes (minced), 1-2 cloves of garlic (minced), 1/2-1 tsp oregano/basil/parsley, generous pinch of crushed red pepper, pinch of salt, about 1/4tsp onion powder. In theory, you should use an egg to bind it, but I really didn’t think it needed it, so I left it out.
The stuffing was reallly similar to a Greek-y stuffing we use in pork or chicken and it could probably be used for that, too.
Read MoreRoasted duck & pork stir fry
Last weekend, I went to Chinatown with my parents. While there, I did some pantry shopping (mmmm chile-garlic sauce!), ate lots and lots and lots of dim sum, and stopped by my favorite little barbecue joint and picked up some roasted duck and pork (both split with my parents). Today, I threw together a quick stir fry — 1.5c (uncooked) brown rice, 1 head of bok choy, your typical aromatics (celery/carrot/onion), the meats, and a little stir fry sauce (2Tbs soy sauce, 2 tsp chile garlic sauce, 1 Tbs sherry or rice wine, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1/2 tsp hoisin, 3 cloves garlic, 1 tsp ginger paste). It was fairly good for something I literally threw together, and I’m definitely looking forward to tomorrow’s lunch (leftovers!), but I think next time, I may add some chiles…
Here are some photos of my trip!
 Last round of dim sum (shrimp rolls & shrimp toast) |
 Shrimp dumplings, meatballs, pork dumplings, chicken dumplings, combo rolls |
 Waiting to order char siu |
 Look at all that beautiful roasted duck... |
Blueberry-Lemon Bread
But I had a huge problem: nowhere in my rented kitchen was a muffin tin, or even a bread pan.
Woe!
So I waited, considering my options for breads and muffins and what would do me better.
Ultimately, I decided on a blueberry-lemon bread recipe found on epicurious, and just had to wait until I happened to have everything I needed to bake it.
As luck would have it, this coincided the same weekend I was gifted with a ginormous mutant zucchini, and I had to put the bread aside for a few days to deal with the squash. But now, it’s 4am, and I couldn’t sleep — too jazzed up. I was hungry, and my sister (my roommate) is gone for the rest of the week, called into work unexpectedly. So I decided to make that blueberry-lemon bread to calm down, and while it baked away, unpacked and cleaned my apartment a bit. (As sad as it is that I’ve been here 17 days now and am not fully unpacked, but truthfully: I unpacked what I originally brought, and went to my parents’ to pick up some more things they’d been holding for me, stashed in the room that used to be mine.)
Anyway: this is brightly lemon, with juicy blueberries. It’s a great, sunshiney bread, good for a raining morning like today.