Classy meets Kiddy

Lets play a game, what word immediately comes to mind when you read these words:

1. Decadence

2. Childhood

If you're anything like me, your two answers were truffles and oreos. If you're not anything like me, you need to sort out your priorities.

So what is the result of our little game? Oreo truffles, courtesy of Centsational Girl. 

This is a deceptively delicious, spectacularly simple recipe that will blow you away. All you need:

1 package of oreos (or knockoff ones if you're a cheap-o and want to save a few cents)

1 package of cream cheese

Chocolate chips

Toppings: I used shredded coconut and heath bar pieces

First chop up all the oreos in a food processor, cream, cookie and all.

Powdered chocolate. Joy.

Next you add the package of cream cheese. If you have a good food processor you can do this in there. If you have a crappy baby minichopper just do it by hand.

Roll into balls somewhere around the size of a ping pong ball or a little smaller and place on a cookie sheet. I put tin foil over mine because I'm lazy and occasionally wasteful and that gives me one less thing to clean.

Plus tin foil looks pretty baller in photos.

Next up melt the chocolate chips in the microwave (or a double-boiler if you're fancy). About 3 minutes should be sufficient, but make sure you take them out every 30 seconds to stir or else the chocolate will start to burn.

Although what doesn't kill you is known to make you stronger (one of my house's mottos), I still recommend using a microwave safe bowl.

I just use a spoon to plop and spread the chocolate over the truffle balls. It's not the end of the world if they aren't totally encased in chocolate, they'll be pretty great regardless.

Just a little truffle peaking through

Lastly just top it all off with your favorite chocolate pairings. The heath bar pieces have been a pretty big hit with my roommates and friends.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I'm thinking about it

That's a joke.

While I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who have the self control to deny themselves something as spectacular as a really good steak, I have no real desire to join them.

HOWEVER meals like this one make me think about it: black bean burgers.

You can find a million and a half recipes online, but I tend to adjust to accommodate: 

1. what I happen to have in the fridge and 

2. which ingredients I most/least like.

This recipe was my jumping off point. (It also happens to be the first recipe on the page when you Google "black bean burgers," but hey, I'm a busy girl), and I also drew a few ideas from this one.

I don't like mayonaisse (in fact, I despise it), so I didn't want to follow the second recipe, but I love to use spices rather than premade seasonings so the chili sauce in the first didn't appeal to me either.

Here's what I used:

16 oz of canned black beans

2 slices of wheat bread, chopped

1 green bell pepper

1 onion

1 packet of fresh cilantro (whatever size your supermarket sells it in, I always use the whole thing)

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 eggs

Zest and juice of 1 lime and 1 lemon

SPICES: pick your favorites. I used cumin, red pepper flakes, basil, salt and pepper 

TOPPINGS: go crazy

The name of the game is mash it all up:

Essentially every ingredient is being mashed up by hand or run through a food processor. Since these are ultimately supposed to be burgers, you're trying to make a vegetable mush that as closely resembles the texture of ground beef as possible.

Mama G says for breading, store bought bread crumbs are fine, but for more substantial things like meatloaf or burgers you should make your own.

Cumin, pre-slicing up

I don't have a really fine zester (is that a word?) so I use a cheese grater which makes these relatively large  gashes.

I didn't take pictures of chopped bell pepper, garlic or onion because I feel like both of those things have appeared on this blog before, and I didn't take a picture of the mashed up black beans because my hands were both covered in bean and none on my roommates were handy to wield the camera for me. 

Once the beans, onion, pepper, bread crumbs, cilantro, lime, lemon and garlic were all chopped, mashed and mixed together, set that aside and crack your two eggs into a bowl. Once they cook the eggs help hold the whole thing together so they're really important. Put the spices you're using into the bowl with the eggs and mix it all together.

The basil was a last minute addition. It's not the most scientific of reasoning, but I felt like it needed a little green.

Dump the egg mixture in with everything else and mix it by hand, forming patties and putting them on a greased cookie sheet. Originally I had imagined myself grilling these but they were just not solid enough to stay together on a grill. I baked them for about 25 minutes at 350 F.

They look a little like really lumpy cookies, no?

While they're cooking get together your preferred toppings. I sliced up some tomato and had arugula and salsa to put on the burgers, as well as regular hamburger buns. I also cut the lemon and lime I had used earlier into wedges to put in our waters, like I did when I had mussels.

Looks like a good spread to me

Lastly, pair with some homemade fries and call it a day!

I did use a top bun too, but for artistic reasons chose not to include it in this photo.

We had a few left over patties too so I ate them with tortilla chips the next day, and I have to say this recipe doubles as a pretty good black bean dip as well.

Oven fries

What blue-blooded American doesn't love a good French fry? (If you say 'Freedom Fry' leave now and never come back). However, unless you have a large and well-appliance-stocked kitchen or work at McDonald's, you probably are like me and don't have a deep fryer readily at your disposal.

So what's a girl to do when she's got that crispy, potato-y craving? Oven fries my friend!

You can find a million different recipes online but the general idea is the same:

Potatoes + oven = french fries.

So grab yourself a couple potatoes. I have 5 people in my house so I think 4 potatoes is sufficient. Even in the oven, these aren't horribly healthy so you can't go too crazy. Plus how many people will really (should really) eat a whole potato with dinner? That's a lot of potato in your diet.

I prefer to peal my potatoes but there are some great skin-on fries out there so pick your poison. Just be sure to clean them very thoroughly if you're going to keep the skins. Yes, oven temperatures will kill germs but who wants to eat dirt flavored fries?

Of course, there's only so much to do with oblong, rounded vegetables, but try to cut them up as evenly as possible. If you're fancy, you can buy a fry cutter that will get you even more exact, but I feel like that's a waste of money. Here's your options though:

This looks like fun to use, no lie.

A little simpler, a lot cheaper.

Next up I drizzled a little olive oil over the potato slices in a bowl and added some spices. This is where you can really get creative and where oven fry recipes can get interesting. I was going pretty simple, so I put salt, pepper and rosemary on mine, but I've seen buffalo fries, parmesan fries, chili fries, etc. Get crazy. I was also making black bean burgers so I wasn't trying to get so fancy.

Note: if you're going to make a lot of fries, make sure you have a large enough pan. I had to use two.

Because they're potatoes prepare to wait a while. In an oven heated to 350 F these babies cooked for probably an hour. Just make sure to take them out and shift them around to keep the bottoms from burning. 

And voila! Oven fries!

A-la-salad

I hate when I hear people say that they hate salads because, if you're willing to annoyingly pry a little bit, you usually come to discover that they don't dislike salad, they dislike plain lettuce.

Who doesn't dislike plain lettuce?

Only this guy 

However, while I've never really had a problem with salads, I only started to love them two years ago when I first went to Sweet Green. With everything from baby arugula, to raspberries, to sweet potato pieces, Sweet Green has every possible salad ingredient you can think of in a make-your-own format. 

Even if you tried, you probably couldn't come up with a mix of ingredients that wouldn't result in a spectacular salad because they truly stick to healthy, fresh, organic ingredients. Of course, you're going to end up paying for the freshness and variety, but as a once in a while treat, its well worth the expense.

While I can in no way recreate the extreme variety of Sweet Green in my own home, I have taken the concept of Sweet Green to heart in that, if you put some thought into what you put into your salads, they can be so much better than lettuce and whichever one or two veggies you had in your fridge.

Because I wanted a salad meal, as opposed to a salad side, I started with preparing some meat. I chopped up a chicken breast into smaller chunks and coated them in this hot sauce. Obviously you can buy generic buffalo hot sauce at the supermarket, but I really like the variety of flavors you can get from smaller vendors. This Tombstone Cilantro hot sauce from Wild Coyote is spectacular on meat, eggs, vegetables, pretty much everything. I bought it at a food street fair in Hoboken a few months ago and I've been loving it ever since. The best part, before I bought it I got to sample their 7 or 8 other flavors too, so I wasn't going into the purchase blind.

I let the chicken sit in the sauce for a good 30 minutes so the flavor could really get into the meat, and then I tossed it on the handy-dandy George Foreman.

Next up are toppings. First I made some homemade croutons, but I also wanted some vegetables. I figured there were enough flavors in the spicy chicken and the croutons that I stuck with simple staples: tomato and cucumber. I like to cube my cucumber instead of slicing it because you get more of a full cucumber flavor plus cucumber slices just don't fit into mouths that well. Whoever decided that slices should be the standard way to cut cucumbers was very silly or had a very large mouth.

Because I was already making croutons and chicken, I decided not to make my own salad dressing, but that's another great way to make your salads more original. I opted for blue cheese because I'm a blue cheese (and Gorgonzola) junky. Instead of pouring your dressing on top of your salad, dress your lettuce in a tuberware, close and shake to coat the lettuce without having to use a ton of dressing.

Last off I cut my chicken into bite sized pieces and put it all together. Tasty dinner-a-la-salad!

Croutons, the icing on top

I apologize for the brief hiatus of posts. After going home for a weekend of skiing and returning to several nights of roommates cooking, I didn't have much cooking to post about. But I'm back, with my newest tasty adventure:

Like any hot-blooded lover of carbs, I feel that no salad is complete without some really spectacular croutons. They truly are the icing on top of an otherwise (usually) healthy decision. Alas, this coincides well with my extreme cheap-o status for not one, but two reasons:

1. Bread is pretty cheap if you're not buying anything fancy. Store bought croutons are marked up for the convenience of having them premade right when you want a salad.

2. Stale bread make for great croutons, so you can save double-y save money by using bread that you would throw out otherwise. (Other great uses for stale bread? Breadcrumbs for breading or making burgers/meatloaf or stuffing)

When I discovered the last bits of my baguette in my cabinet I immediately thought of making croutons. It was essentially rock solid at this point so it wouldn't have been good for much else besides breaking teeth.

I like bigger croutons so you get real flavor with them instead of just a little bit of crunch so I cubed the baguette into pretty big chunks. Then you just sprinkle with olive oil and whichever spices you most want on your croutons. I used basil and garlic powder with a little salt and pepper. For easy coating, I did this in a big tuberware so that I could put the top on and shake it up so all my bread chunks got some oil and spices.

Lastly, just spread them out on a cookie sheet and pop 'em into a preheated oven. How long you cook them depends on how crunchy (burned) you want your croutons to be. I put mine in for about 12 or 13 minutes and they were nice and crisp but kept that homey baguette flavor.

Looks pretty good, no? I didn't use all of them in one go, but they keep pretty well in a tuberware largely because they came from stale bread to start with, so how much worse could it get?

Check back tomorrow for the salad I put these little babies on.

Rice-a-Roni: What not to do.

When making easy boxed meals, read the directions.

I'm going to say that again.

Read the directions.

And then follow those directions.

Yup.

Follow them.

If you're dumb like me, you glance at the box to check the ingredients, shrug and say to yourself, "how hard can it be?" and toss that box into the recycling bin.

Then you put all the ingredients together, turn on the heat, feel guilty for not really paying attention to the directions, fish the box back out of the recycling bin, and realize that you did it wrong.

When making Rice-a-Roni, the water and spices go in AFTER you've melted the butter and browned the rice. (I know, not the same as Ramen noodles. Whodathunk?)

The end result really wasn't terrible, it just wasn't as good as Rice-a-Roni I've had in the past. Which is saying something cause, well, it's Rice-a-Roni.

My new nemesis

Luckily, there are no instructions on marinading meat so I did that much right. Since I was making stir-fry flavored Rice-a-Roni, I decided on a teriyaki marinade. I cut the cheapest piece of steak I could find at the supermarket into strips so I could get as much surface area exposed to the sauce as possible. (Note: I didn't only buy cheap steak cause I'm cheap, also if you're marinading the cut doesn't matter as much. Marinated meat is less likely to be dry and you're messing with the natural steak flavor anyways. Alternatively, marinading a filet mignon is a crime).

I let my steak soak in the marinade for probably about an hour, but that's not a scientific time. Mostly I was ready to eat an hour after I put the marinading steak in the fridge. I would definitely say you should give it a 30 minute minimum though. If you're obsessive compulsive like me flip the pieces every 15 minutes or so.

Because I don't believe in meals that lack vegetables, I decided on snow peas. They tend to really only show up in Asian cooking, but they're one of my favorites so I buy them just for snacking a lot of the time too. For a unique flavor, I recommend sauteing them in sesame oil. I really love the richness of it--much more flavorful than olive oil--but it doesn't overpower the flavor of whatever you're cooking.

Once the oil was hot I tossed in the beans, stirred them around and then added some salt and pepper, nothing too fancy. How long you cook them depends on your preferences. I like my veggies crisp so I took them off pretty quickly. The best estimate is trial and error: just keep grabbing one and eating it until they're how you like them.

While this was going on I turned on our George Forman and once it was hot, tossed on the steak. If you're in college like me and live in university housing, you probably can't have a grill (rats!). In that case, definitely buy a George Forman. They're just so easy to use and grilling is one of the best ways to cook something. 

Look at those grill marks! Beauteous!

Toss it all together in a bowl and I've got a dinner of champions!

The best part is that there was enough for me to fill a tuberware to take to work for lunch tomorrow! Three cheers for not eating Hot Pockets!

Classic mussels

For a solid several years now, my favorite food has been mussels in a lemon white wine sauce, probably the most common staple of any seafood restaurant's appetizer menu. For someone who typically loves really vibrant, flavorful food, it's a surprisingly mellow dish, but it just brings together so many of my favorite flavors that I'm never not in the mood for mussels.

Needless to say, when I saw that mussels were on sale at the Acme on the way home from work I couldn't resist (okay, I admit it, I may have been somewhat intentionally browsing the seafood section, and I probably would have bought them anyways, but I get to feel good about it because they were on sale).

Like the base for pretty much every good sauce in the history of sauces, you start with hot olive oil in the pan and saute up some garlic. If you have a garlic press, that's the best way to deal with it, but mine is really crappy and just smooshes it so I usually dice my garlic. 

BUBBLES! Bubblesy bubblesy blubadubalee bubbles......my bubbles.

Once the garlic was just starting to turn golden, I added some white cooking wine, probably about a cup, and half a lemon's worth of juice. If you want to get fancy you can buy whatever kind of wine you think would best compliment the fish, but I think plain old cooking wine does the job just fine. Plus all the alcohol cooks off anyways so why waste good wine?

Next I added a quarter of an onion, diced up small. This is totally optional, I add onion to almost any meal I can find a place for it, but if you don't love onion, skip it. However, if you do use the onion, wait until the wine has had time to heat up. I made the mistake of putting the onion in right away and it just kind of sat there for awhile. It still tasted fine, so I guess it's not a big deal, but I really like the sizzle when you add a new ingredient to a hot sauce so I'll wait in the future.

Hey onions, do more!

While the onions simmered (eventually), I got my hands on some bread. Believe me, you're going to want bread to soak up all the leftover sauce. My baguette from the other day had started to go stale, but Mama G let me in on a trick to fix that: wrap the bread up in some tin foil and pop it in the oven or toaster for a good 5 or 10 minutes. It will come out toasty and soft as day 2 if not day 1.

I tend to be a big milk drinker, but milk and seafood just don't work well together in my mind, so I opted for water. But why not jazz it up a bit.? Instead of throwing out the half a lemon I used in the sauce I just popped it in a glass of water. How classy am I?

Drink me!

 Are you ready for mussels yet? They're really fast so you don't need to worry about them very much until the end. I steamed the mussels which is probably the easiest thing ever in the cooking world. Cover the bottom of a big pot (important: you MUST have a lid that fits it) with about a half inch of water and bring it to a boil. I also put some of the cooking wine in so that the flavor would really cook into the mussels. Once it starts to boil, drop in the mussels and cover. They really only need to steam for about 3 minutes; as soon as the shells pop open they're done.

*Something I forgot and regretted once I started eating: rinse them first. You'll never get all the sand out, and they were still perfectly edible and delicious when I was done, but a quick rinse will at least get rid of a little of the sand and make a difference when you're eating.

Ooooo, steamy.

Here is where I got stupid. I was so excited to dig in, I immediately poured off the water (not all of it, you want to keep some because it has the mussel flavor in it now which will really add to your sauce) and poured on the sauce. Then I noticed the tuberware of shitake mushrooms sitting on the counter next to me. Mussels aren't terribly filling so I had intended to cook them into the sauce too just to add a little more matter to the meal.

I quickly heated up another batch of oil, garlic, wine and lemon juice to cook them in and mushrooms cook fast so it wasn't the end of the world, but it did add a solid 15 minutes or so to my cook time. Not cool. Luckily since the extra sauce and mushrooms were hot, they warmed the mussels back up.

M's favorite food :)

Last tip: use a shallow bowl or a plate with a deep center so that you can have lots of room for sauce on the bottom. I use the mussel shells like little spoons to scoop up some sauce with every bite of mussel. Hate to go all Rachel Ray on you, but delish!

Gorgonzola chicken rolls

Given yesterday's ballad to gorgonzola, I'm sure you're excited to know what delicious meal I made with it. As per my typical style, I just found a way to mesh all the things in my fridge that I was most looking forward to eating into one meal, albeit a meal too long to fit in the post title: Gorgonzola bacon mushroom chicken rolls. I know. Cue the angelic chorus.

I got the idea from a meal my sister made a couple years ago. Really all I remember is that there were thin chicken breasts rolled around several ingredients that definitely included some kind of cheese, but that's a pretty good start in my book. 

Any and all meals can be improved by bacon, so I started with that. I got it nice and crispy because I wanted to break it up and have little bacon bits mixed in with the cheese, but I've found recipes where the full piece of still under-cooked bacon is just laid on the piece of chicken and rolled too.

I was a little worried getting my camera lens this close to some seriously sizzling bacon fat, but I think I escaped damage.

The next ingredient was sauteing up some mushrooms. Any variety will work I imagine, but shitakes were on sale this week and I really love their earthy flavor. I think baby portabellas would probably go better with the Italian theme of the dish but I'm a rebel obviously so I do what I want!

Portabella, portashmella

I sliced each head into three strips each, this gave me pretty similarly sized pieces. Usually I saute mushrooms in butter, but I figured with the bacon and the cheese, I could afford to go light on the calories here. I used a little chicken stock and some lemon juice and I had to stop myself from eating them right out of the pan instead of putting them in the chicken.

While they were cooking I prepped the chicken. I pounded it with my fists because supposedly that makes a difference, but I refuse to use pompous sounding words like 'tenderize' without a disclaimer. I lightly salted and peppered each side and threw on some dried basil because hey, why not?

I bought the 'thin' chicken breasts cause they roll easier but as a lifelong cheapskate, I didn't like it. If you're handy enough with a knife save yourself a few bucks and buy the regular breasts. It's something amazing like two bucks less a pound! Highway robbery if you ask me.

Next came the CHEESE! Yesssssssssss

Plus the bacon bits. Forget the raw chicken part and that looks good enough to eat already, right?

After this I laid on the mushroom strips (and contentedly ate the extras), and rolled 'em up. I used a mini meatloaf pan because I wanted to make sure I didn't have cheese dripping all over my oven and burning cause I'm a slob, and it would probably take me an inappropriately long time to get around to scraping it off.

I was worried because I didn't have any toothpicks, but they seemed to stay put together pretty well on their own.

The tricky part was cook times because I didn't really know how to judge when they were done. Based on similar recipes I found online, I gave them 25 minutes but they were definitely a little dry. I would recommend sticking to 20. After all, you'll be really annoyed, but you can always cook under-cooked meat more, you can't un-cook it.

And the finished masterpiece! I'm definitely going to have to make this one again for the roomies.

Since this was a little on the work intensive side, I recommend an easy side. I made a simple cucumber and onion salad that I thought complimented the chicken flavors really well.

Keep an eye out for more Gorgonzola recipes. I didn't finish it and I can't wait to change that.

Gorgonzola is the god of cheeses

I've decided to do something new with this post. I was just going to write about this meal that I made, but I got caught up in one of the main ingredients, Gorgonzola cheese. Before I knew it, I had written a veritable ode to its sharp, cheesy goodness and I realized it was far too much to squeeze into one post with a whole recipe. And thus is born the "Flavor Profile" style of post in which I extol the virtues of my favorite ingredients.

One thing you will quickly discover is that cheese is a major food group in my diet. If the food pyramid was still around, cheese would single-handedly fill that gigantic bottom chunk that was dedicated to carbs before we figured out that carbs don't actually do much for you.

Last semester I studied abroad in Italy, and what I honestly miss the most about it was the tiny family owned mini market across the street from my apartment. I know you're staring at your computer screen shaking your head and going "Yeah sure, you liar. What about the fashion and the coffee and the traveling and the clubs and the Italian men and the three euro wine?" But truly, that little market was my home away from home. They had the most incredible fresh baked bread and deli meats and cheeses. They just don't make meat and cheese like that in the US.

At least twice a week I would buy another huge hunk of some new type of cheese. Half the time I didn't even recognize the name of whatever I bought, I would just point and say "vorrei <butcher Italian name of cheese> per favore." Then there would be this hilarious little run where the deli guy would laugh at me and mime where to cut off a piece and I would say "piu" or "meno" (a huge grammatical error, but clear enough in the execution) until I felt there was enough to feed my inner cheese monster without buying out the shop.

So where is this very long winded story going? Gorgonzola. My Italian boyfriend and one true forever love.

This image is from Wikipedia. I believe you're allowed to use their pictures, but I figured I should give them a shout out just in case. 

Of course, I didn't live under a culinary rock before I went to Italy, so I'd had Gorgonzola before, but like I said, they just don't make cheese like that in the US. Also, I'd only ever had it in prepared dishes, rather than tasting it alone. Such a big difference.

If you've never had Gorgonzola, or don't know if you have, it's a type of blue cheese that originated in northern Italy. Several towns claim to be the true creators, but as it bears it's name, I'm putting my money on Gorganzola, Milan.

Although it is unlikely anyone really knows how the cheese originated, I like this story best:

"One evening, a love-struck casaro, or cheesemaker, rushed out to meet his girlfriend without finishing his work. The following morning, fearing he might lose his job if it was discovered he had thrown out the previous day's batch of unfinished cheese curd, he surreptitiously dumped it in with the new milk supply.

This set in motion a process that produced a greenish-blue-veined curd with a strang look and a pungent oder - sometimes compared to smelly socks by detractors - and Gorgonzola cheese was born." -Rebecca Helm-Ropelato, The birthplace of Gorgonzola. Maybe. www.csmonitor.com/2005/0202/p11s02-lifo.html


Now you have a fun story to tell the next bitter, dramatic person who asks you what good love is.

Similar cheeses are the French's Roquefort (of which I am also a fan) and the English's Stilton. All three have protected designation of origin, meaning that only cheeses actually created in that region may bear that name. However that only applies within certain areas--in this case the EU. (Does this concept sound familiar? That's because vidalia onions have the same protection in the US, which I mentioned in my summer salad post)

It's a cow cheese if you're squeamish about other dairy sources (a goat cheese post will surely surface some day in the future). Though I've never understood being squeamish about cheese seeing as the whole point of it is to take milk and let it spoil. In this case, to the point of growing blue mold. If you didn't know cheese was bad milk, I'm sorry for the spoiler, but like Santa Claus, sometimes you just have to man up and accept it.

Because most people aren't huge fans of the really strong blue cheese flavor (I am, but I've always been a bit off) it's usually cooked into something such as a risotto, or with other cheeses, such as in a lasagna, on a pizza or mixed into a pasta dish. While I love Gorgonzola in all of those cases, I think it's best on some crackers with some fruit.

Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Cheese Talk