Honey Glazed Carrots with Cilantro

So, this recipe is good and the results were unexpectedly pleasant, but there are a couple of things I’d do differently. The first is, I’d skip the big carrots and just split a bunch of baby carrots in half. It would cut the prep time. But I managed to peel the big carrots with a knife (please remind me to purchase a peeler) and get them in the pan. I added the water and oil and cooked them until the water evaporated, which was closer to 20 minutes. I continued to cook them another two minutes and they weren’t golden, they were still orange. I added the honey and the water (I would prefer the wine, but we were out!) I cooked them another two minutes stirring continuously with a wooden spoon as directed. Unfortunately, my wooden spoons are white so the carrots turned it orange. (This mostly came off in the dishwasher, but not completely!) Finally, I squeezed in some cilantro from a tube since I have difficulty using an entire bunch of fresh cilantro from the grocery store and the cilantro I am “growing” on my porch is on life support. The results were surprisingly good. My two year approved too! Next time though, I may just microwave the carrots, water and oil to cut some time, and then transfer into a hot pan to caramelize. Overall though, a winner!

Pinecone Bird Feeder

Normally, I'd write about people food but my two year old loved this so I thought I'd share. The Aquarium in VIrginia Beach gave us this idea. We found the pinecone while out at the park.  After tying a string to it, we took peanut butter and spread it on the ponecone.Then we put it in a plastic bag with birdseed and shook it to coat the peanut butter with the birdseed. We hung it from a tree outside and sat to watch the birds eat. A simple but fun activity for a toddler!

Warm Potato Salad

There is something that I don’t think I have mentioned yet. I don’t like eggs unless they are an ingredient in a baked goods batter. Seriously, I can’t stand them. They smell terrible and have a variety of repulsive textures that I find nauseating. So it may seem a little surprising that I selected the warm potato salad recipe. I did so with the thought of egg substitution in mind. The thought of a potato salad that was not sullied by the presence of those vile chunks of egg I still find appealing. However, this is not my greatest culinary triumph. In fact, several things about it equaled a barely edible result!

Of course, I decided to substitute the eggs (wretched) with an avocado (delightful). I started off with the potatoes. I don’t have a steamer basket so I decided to microwave the potato chunks. This worked just fine but I think the two potatoes resulted in vastly more potato chunks than are required for this recipe, which is where things started to go wrong. I mixed up the oil, vinegar and Dijon mustard. I didn’t have any red wine vinegar so I used balsamic. I have Dijon mustard but it is Dijon honey mustard, so I increased this to two teaspoons in order to give it some kick. I don’t think these two ingredients really go together, but I pressed on.

Once the potatoes were out of the microwave I added them to the oil/vinegar/mustard mixed and stirred them up to coat. At this point, I thought there might not be enough sauce for the potatoes but wasn’t sure. I cut up half the red onion and the avocado and added them to the mix. Since the balsamic vinegar is brownish, it gave the avocado a brown tinge. I added salt and pepper and stepped back. This is not something you will see plated in a restaurant.  I crossed my fingers and served it to my Mom. My poor Mom, she really doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment.

It wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t good. For one thing, there was way too much onion in this mix, which means if I used the correct ratio of potatoes it would’ve been even more overpowering. I think they made my Mom’s eyes water (sorry Mom)! As always, she tried to be supportive and said it was alright. I ate some. Ew. Somehow the fact that the potatoes were warm made it worse. To top it off, except for the onion, it was bland. My two year old ate two bites and then refused the rest. At least she shows signs of good taste and good sense! I saved the considerable leftovers and tried them cold the next day. Normally I do not like to waste food, but this went in the trash. Ah failure, I am so familiar with you! It was truly tragic to waste a perfectly good avocado.

Oven Mexican Quinoa

Quinoa has listed as a “super food” for the last few years now. I never had it growing up and have never cooked it before. Of course in my mind my first thought was “how hard can it be?”! Not too difficult as it turns out, although I have a couple of adjustments I will make next time.

Right out of the gate I needed to make a change to the instructions. I don’t own a food processor and I can’t justify the expense of one for the little use it would provide me. So, I decided I could chop up the onion, tomatoes, garli and jalapeno and use a blender to mix them. This worked out just fine (thank god you can take apart the pitcher and put it in the dishwasher!). I did reduce the jalapeno for the vegetable mixture to one from two so it wouldn’t be as spicy for my two year old!

I decided ahead of time that I’d substitute for the walnut oil since I don’t have other anticipated needs for walnut oil and didn’t want to waste the rest. The alternates at the end of the recipe suggest using nonstick cooking spray, so I used a bit of this approximately two teaspoons of olive oil so the quinoa wouldn’t burn in the pan. I cooked it for 8 minutes, although I didn’t see much happen. I am not sure what would’ve happened if I had skipped this step. I am open to comments on this! I did add the other jalapeno and cook for another minute and then added the broth, salt, cumin and tomato paste. I spent some time trying to stir up the tomato paste so it wasn’t a big clump. I am not sure this ingredient was needed either!

So, I put all of this into a casserole dish and covered it with tinfoil. At this point it looked like soup. A sinking feeling settled into my already rumbling stomach as I put it into the oven. I checked on it to stir it at 15 minutes and it still looked like soup. Oh boy. I checked on it at 30 minutes and decided it still seemed too soupy. My solution to this was to remove the tinfoil and hope it evaporated some. When the timer buzzed I removed the dish from the oven and….. still a bit soupy but not terrible. It needed a bowl not a plate though! I dished it into bowls, added cilantro and lime juice and a bit of cheese, because let’s face it, cheese is delicious. The cheese melted on top and it tasted pretty good. A direct quote from my Mom “it’s different but it tastes alright”. Maybe not a rave review, but she was willing to let me test this out on her. She did use half the onion next go-around so it wouldn’t overpower the other ingredients and I agree. My two year old liked that I would add cheese at her request (multiple requests actually).

Overall, I’ll make it again. The leftovers heated up quite well and it all got eaten. Now if only I can figure out what to do with the rest of the tomato paste………

Grilled Steak & Spring Vegetable Salad

Recently my two year old has decided that grilling is her favorite way to cook. She thinks of it as a free pass to play outside. Since we all need a little vitamin D, I clipped this recipe to try over the weekend. We stopped during the week and purchased all of the ingredients, except the asparagus. The grocery store we were in did not have any. Isn't that kind of strange?

I started with the dressing. I thought fresh lemon juice would be better than from a bottle. I used three half lemons and think it was close to five tablespoons. I used just under a ¼ cup of olive oil to try to keep things light. I used grated parmesan cheese from the fridge because it was available, and because I figured I could skip the blender and just mix it in a bowl, saving some cleaning. Real chefs would probably frown upon this, but sometimes you have to make your life manageable for yourself. I mixed up the dressing and set it aside. I added a little extra salt and a bunch of pepper and performed a taste test. So far so good! I began gathering the grilling items and then remembered we didn’t have any asparagus. To the grocery store we went!

As a side note, I am just like the majority of the population in that I enter the grocery store and exit with 15 items, sometimes without the item I need. To avoid this issue, we went into the grocery store and found the asparagus first, then got a basket for other items. Why I decided a fresh papaya, avocados and gummy bears were essential I cannot say but once we found the milk and the basket got heavy, we were ready to go. Not before I let my two year old hold the can of orange soda I was drinking while I carried the basket. She finished the soda by drinking/spilling it down her shirt. Fortunately, she was wearing her Halloween pumpkin shirt so you could barely see it. Yes, I am aware that it is April, but she loves that outfit and it still fits! Incidentally, orange soda mustache is hard to get off of a two year old’s face.

We returned home, put the excess groceries away and then got back down to business. We gathered all of our grilling supplies and headed outside. Two minutes later we returned to get sunglasses, tinfoil, paper towels, and cups of water. J Once I go the grill started, I put on the steak. Yes, I made the rather obvious mistake of putting the meat on before the grill was really hot. So the meat did not have the charred look of the grill, but cooked up okay. I cooked the asparagus and the artichoke hearts until the asparagus was done. I think the artichoke hearts could’ve used more charring, but it was getting late and we were hungry!

Back inside, I cut up the steak, asparagus and artichoke hearts and put them in the bowl with the cherry tomatoes. Then I removed them from the bowl, halved the tomatoes and again added the grilled items. I poured approximately half of the dressing over them and tossed with spoons. I rinsed off the arugula. I used baby arugula because that’s all that was available and really, who doesn’t love miniature everything? I will comment that four cups of arugula is a gargantuan portion. I think we’d have been fine with two cups and the same dressing.  I tossed the rest of the dressing with the arugula and got out some plates, as the photo shows above. I put the grated store bought parmesan cheese on the table and we sat down to eat. As it turns out, my two year old loves arugula, as long as you coat each piece with parmesan cheese! She asked for more cheese about a dozen times and ate most of the plate. I may have had seconds! The most important lesson from this recipe though is that it is fun to watch a two year old say arugula with an orange mustache.

Mjeddrah (Middle Eastern Lentil Pilaf)

I am just going to come out and say it, this dish the way I made it looks a little like a bowl of gray goop. Shockingly, I may have made a couple of errors making it! However, it tastes pretty good. Try to keep an open mind…….

I started screwing up this recipe in the grocery store. The recipe calls for brown or red lentils. I looked all over and all I could find were lentils with a garlic and herb packet. The bag just says lentils and to me they look green rather than brown or red. Since that was the only option, I decided that maybe the greenish lentils were similar to brown. I am not sure what kind of alien logic determined this for me, but there it is. In the same aisle (I swear I was dead sober throughout this entire exercise) I looked for long grain wild rice. Since wild rice seemed to be the wrong choice (in retrospect, a far better one than I selected) I bought the only brown rice in the aisle. Unfortunately, it was boil-in-a-bag rice and that might not be what they traditionally use in Middle Eastern cooking. Finally, I wandered around the spice aisle looking for cardamom pods. No dice. So I bought a jar of ground cardamom and called it a day.

When I decided to tackle the recipe, I again proved that following directions is only of marginal importance in my world. I rinsed off the lentils (I wasn’t sure what they meant by picked over, they looked alright to me) and put them in the boiling water. They sat for about three hours before it was time to make dinner according to my two year old’s clock. I laid out all of the ingredients and started to look for the carrot peeler. Then I remember I lost it in dish washer accident (it slipped down into the bottom and the handle broke off, no damage to the dish washer) a year ago which drives home how dependent I am on bags of baby carrots and frozen vegetables. Fortunately, I remembered I have a knife that I have neglected to sharpen, ever, so it seemed dull enough to use as a peeler without losing a digit. This worked out much better than my plans typically do.

I sautéed the onions, celery and carrots and all seemed well. I added them into the pot of lentils. Then I transferred the whole mixture into a larger pot since there was no way everything was going to fit. At least none of the pots in my house get lonely when I cook. I added three cups of water under the same delusion that green lentils and brown lentils are the same and then removed the rice from the boil in the bag home it knew and threw it into the pot. I added the garlic (finely chopped in my world but kind of chunky for the general population), Chile pepper and cinnamon stick. The cumin was no problem but when I got to the cardamom, I remembered I needed a whole pod equivalent. Google indicated that two pods is approximately 1/3 of a teaspoon. This isn’t terribly convenient information since I don’t have a 1/3 teaspoon in my measuring spoons set; however, the recipe called for 2-4 pods so between 1/3 and 2/3 of a teaspoon, or a heaping ½ teaspoon it is! I brought it to a boil as instructed. The final error comes with the additional water. I added a cup about halfway through and then poured it off towards the end. I also ended up turning up the heat at the end in the attempt to de-humidify the mix. As you can see from the photo, maybe not as successfully as I hoped!

At this point, my two year old is hugging my leg saying “Mom, I am SO hungry” so I added a bunch of salt and pepper, maybe 20 twists a piece from the grinder. This seems like a lot, but I had a veritable vat of Mjeddrah at this point. Then it was time to eat. Amazingly, even though it looked like a pile of goop, it tasted pretty good. My two year old liked it and ate two helpings. We had it the next day. And the next. The recipe says six servings but this is true only if you are feeding calorie loading super distance runners at your house. Next time, I might try to find the correct lentils and rice. Or I might just cook the vegetables and add the spices. It might be just as delicious, better for me and look more appetizing! Ah well, you can’t win them all!