Poor Lady's Pho

I have recently become a member of a fabulous bulk retailer (who shall remain nameless) and took all three of my kids shopping there a couple of weeks ago.  We actually had a pretty good time, tooling around the store, trying samples and finding all of those "extras" that weren't on my original list.  One of the samples we stopped for was pre-made, frozen meatballs which were sold in either Pineapple-Teriyaki or Mango-Jalapeno flavor.  We opted for the pineapple version, since my kids aren't that big on spice, and stuck them in the freezer when we got home.  I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with them until inspiration (in the form of cleaning out the fridge) struck. 

I had about 3/4 of a box of chicken stock in the fridge, along with a bunch of cilantro, a jalapeno and a few onions (from our garden!) that needed to be used up.  I asked my husband to grab a box of Thai rice noodles (wide, flat noodles, not unlike linguine) from the store and, when he got home, I set the frozen meatballs to simmer in the chicken stock (plus a cup or two of water).  After they came up to temp, I added soy sauce, hoisin sauce and the remnants of a bottle of vegan Worcestershire sauce to the stock, stirred it around and let it continue to bubble away.  I boiled the noodles as per the package directions and, when they were tender, I rinsed them in cold water and drained them thoroughly.  I washed the cilantro, sliced the jalapeno and onion and grabbed some Thai basil from our garden.  I added a couple of wedges of lemon (I didn't have any limes) and we were good to go.  Everyone got a serving of noodles and meatballs (some with more broth than others) and could top it as they saw fit.  The kids mostly went plain Jane (one of them adding a teeny squeeze of lemon), but my husband and I loaded up on herbs, peppers and onions.  It was super tasty and everyone ate (almost) all of their dinner.....but.  But, the next day, both my husband and I were feeling distinctly queasy.  Could it have been the meatballs?  Possibly.  The kids felt fine and, in fact, finished off the meatballs the next day for lunch.  As for me, I love any and all kinds of pho (even my fake, multi-ethnic version), but I could not stomach the thought of eating any more of that meal.  I don't think I will be buying those meatballs again.....

Goodbye, Winter Garden! You Were Delicious!

Yesterday, my husband and our daughters ripped out the winter garden that we had at our community garden plot.  The community garden happens to be at my local YMCA, so, while they did that, I was inside, having a nice little workout, which has left me very sore this morning.  Thank you, Body Pump!  It was funny because, as I was working my tail off (literally), I could see the three of them, out the window, working their tails off gardening.  After my class was finished and I had reclaimed my toddler from the nursery, we all went out to see the results of all of their hard work.  They had an enormous pile of onions of all shapes, sizes and varieties, as well as a couple dozen good sized carrots.  Sadly, most of our other plants either succumbed to the Texas heat (starting to become of the "hotter than hell" variety) or the bane of my gardening existence: bugs that I call "squash bores".  (I call them that because....that....is their name.)  Anyway, my once gorgeous artichoke plant was the latest, and perhaps most tragic, victim and had to be cut back to a mere shadow of its former self.  I hope that it will survive, but we shall have to see.  In any case, they planted some new munchables for the bugs - melons and cucumbers, specifically.  We loaded up the onions and carrots, took them home to clean and.....

A freaking hour later, I was finally finished cleaning the dirt off of all of my lovely veggies.  I really didn't know what I wanted to do with them (and the five new potatoes that they also dug up), so I made sure they weren't going to make a mess in my fridge or take up too much room and I let our dinner menu percolate in my head for a bit.  What I eventually came up with was this: a caramelized onion and new potato tart with white cheddar cheese, served with honey glazed carrots.  I sliced all of the onions into 1/8 inch slices and cooked them for about 20 minutes in olive oil on medium to medium high heat until they were completely soft and a lovely browned color.  I set them aside to cool, while I cooked the carrots, also sliced into 1/8 inch pieces.  I added them, another tablespoon of olive oil, salt, pepper and about 2 teaspoons of honey to a skillet with about 1/2 a cup of water.  I let them simmer, covered, in the water mixture until they were soft, then uncovered the pan and let the honey and oil caramelize and glaze the carrots. 

I found another yeast-less pizza crust recipe (2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon of salt, 2/3 cup water and 1/4 cup olive oil), so I whipped that out, pressed it into a rectangular shape, topped it with paper thin slices of potato (salted and peppered those), the caramelized onions and finished it off with about four ounces of shredded white cheddar cheese.  I baked the tart in a 425 degree oven for about 20 minutes, until the cheese was melted and lightly browned in spots, and the potatoes were cooked through.

I wasn't expecting a thoroughly warm reception from the kids for this dinner (mainly because of the preponderance of onions, caramelized and hidden by cheese or no), but the girls ate it up!  They even came back for seconds!  Our son, on the other hand, usually a vegetarian by nature, refused to eat a single bite of the tart.  He ate a couple of carrots and steadfastly refused to eat anything else.  (This could have had more to do with the fact that, because dinner was running really late, we gave him his full cup of milk as an amuse bouche.)

Based on my general success, I left the dinner table last night feeling like a bit of a culinary bad-ass.  I mean, I literally took a pile of root vegetables that were dug up (from the ground!) in the morning and turned them into a tasty, satisfying vegetarian meal to feed our family of five for dinner that night.  I used ingredients that were in my pantry and fridge to round out the meal and (almost) everyone ate it!  See?  Culinary bad-ass. 

A New Vegetable!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about a wonderful three-ingredient pasta recipe that I have and utilize very frequently (often to the dismay of my older kids): Three Ingredient Dinner? Yes, please!  Last night, I played with a variation on that recipe, using organic frozen peas and a new find at my local grocery store, frozen Broccoli Romesco!  I really wish I had taken a picture of either the package or the final product after I was done cooking the meal, but I super suck at remembering to do that, so I will just apologize to my sister (who I know reads my blog and who is constantly telling me that I need to have more pictures and less words and who I apparently don't listen to very often) right now.  Anyway, this Broccoli Romesco stuff is a cross between regular old broccoli and regular old cauliflower and it is the weirdest, prettiest vegetable I think I have ever seen.  You know what broccoli looks like, right?  Tiny, deep emerald green (if you haven't cooked the bejesus out of it) trees?  OK.  Now picture a chartreuse Christmas tree.  Got it?  No?  Well, that is pretty much the only way I can describe this stuff - light, yellowish green and conical shaped.  The flavor was somewhere between that of broccoli and cauliflower (stop saying, "duh"!) - it was lightly nutty and very, very slightly sweet, but completely lacking that kind of sulfurous stank that broccoli can have.  My kids seemed to enjoy it (sort of), but it did get eaten (pretty much).  They all at least tried it and I have to say, I think it really perked up the dish for me.  I also really liked it because it came in a "steams in the bag in the microwave" package, which made it super simple for me to whip together the dinner in less than 30 minutes.  I promise that next time I buy the Broccoli Romesco, I will not only post a picture of the packaging, but also of the resulting dish.

Author's Note: In addition to remembering to take a picture, I also will need to brush up on my Mendelian genetics because my oldest daughter wanted an explanation of how the cross between the broccoli and cauliflower came to pass.  That was fun and you would never know that I had actually studied that stuff in college (I was Pre-Med) the way I was stumbling over terms like "recessive" and "dominant" and "traits".  I am pretty sure she thinks I just made it all up. 

Second Author's Note: The sad part about this story is that I was actually growing purple Broccoli Romesco in my garden and was very excited about it as I had never actually tasted it.  Then, the bunny descended (Gardening Successes and Failures) upon my tender little plants and I am sorry to report that the Broccoli Romesco never had a chance.  Apparently, rabbits know a good thing when they see it as well. 

Gardening Successes and Failures

One of the million things I do these days is keep a garden plot in the community garden at our YMCA.  In theory, it is a fantastic idea - you get a 16 foot by 16 foot plot of land with free watering provided by the Y and you can plant pretty much anything your little heart desires (within the bounds of the law, people; i.e. no pot growing operation).  We have been planting ours for almost a year now and have seen success and failure in equal measure.  The days here in Texas are slowly growing warmer (then colder, then warmer, then colder) and as we get further into Spring, I know that it is past time for me to rip out all my cold weather vegetables (most of which were decimated by a bunny attack earlier this year) and plant spring and summer selections.  Honestly, I am not sure if I have the energy for it at this point.  We have had a REALLY long softball season with our oldest daughter and that, coupled with, like I said, the other million things that I do, I haven't even started thinking about what I want to put into the ground.  You would think that, feeling the gardening fatigue and seeing almost $80 worth of produce go into a small varmint's (I apparently don't have Yosemite Sam Spell Check on here, so I am not sure if that is spelled right) digestive tract, that I would just give up the gardening plot.  I would, but for.....

This.  This is one of the main reasons that I am resisting giving up the garden plot.  It is a freaking artichoke, y'all.  And I freaking grew it!  As a matter of fact, we freaking ate the one you are looking at last night!  And it was pretty freaking good!  As you can see in the picture, I have a few more coming in and I am pretty excited!  I cleaned this artichoke (sadly almost a week after we took it off of the plant - I know, what's the point of growing your own food if you are not going to eat it right away?  I'm lazy, that's what.) by taking off the bottom couple of rows of leaves, and clipping the spiny tips off of the leaves that I left.  I cut the stem end off (usually also edible, as part of the heart structure, but this was way past its expiration date) to create a flat bottom and put it in a little pan, with a little bit of water, slapped a lid on it and set it on medium heat to steam.  Of course, as per usual, when cooking artichokes, I let it go a bit too long and the water dried out, so the bottom burned, but I almost like them better that way.  Yeah, that's it.

Anyway, I don't know if you have ever seen an artichoke plant in person.  I actually had not until my husband (boyfriend at the time) and I took a road trip up to DC (geez....16 years ago.  *sigh*), by way of Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia.  Apparently, Thomas Jefferson, like myself, had a fondness for this particularly tasty thistle and had rows upon rows of giant artichoke plants on his plantation.  (If you have never been to this area and to Virginia in particular - it is spectacular.  One of the best places we have ever been.)  The point is that artichoke plants are HUGE and I am unlikely to plant one in our backyard garden.  It seems a shame to give up a planting space that is actually producing my very favorite vegetable, so...I probably won't.  I will probably keep going with it because, truly, the successes in the garden are so much fun and tend to cancel out the more appalling failures (bunny attacks).  I remember how excited I was last year when I grew my one and only zucchini (before the squash bugs descended and decimated those plants).  I never expected to see artichokes on my plant (they are not actually supposed to be very suited for Texas weather), but I was beyond thrilled to see them there.  I was also beyond thrilled to eat my success last night and will be pleased to do so again very soon.  I guess I also need to get busy deciding what is going in our plot soon.  The artichoke needs some company and I'm gonna need some more home grown veggies to enjoy. 

Growing our Dinner

I seem to have burned myself out of baking our own bread at this point.  I have (gasp!) been buying bread at our local grocery store ever since we returned from Disney World two weeks ago.  Granted, we have had a couple of emergent and stressful situations come up in that time, so I don't feel too bad about it, but I can definitely tell the difference between how I feel when consuming something I made myself and the products that I find on the store shelves.  (Primarily, feeling "full" and "nourished" with my from-scratch bread.)  This is not to mention the fact that the bread that I used to buy every week (cough....HEB brand 100% Whole Wheat Bread, I am looking at you....cough) is now carrying a label indicating that it is processed in a facility using nuts and tree nuts!  Blerg!  I had to switch to the more expensive, name-brand bread and even that has an ingredient list that might as well be called an ingredient paragraph.  I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that I was feeling particularly lazy in regards to baking as of late and her response was, "yeah, you are so lazy!  You don't want to bake ALL of your family's bread for the week!"  I know how silly it sounds; I want to get back to baking everything, and now I know that I probably need to get back to it, but the shine is off and, right now at least, it seems like work.  Anyway.....

Despite not baking the past couple of weeks, I have been productive, specifically with my garden plot in our local community garden.  It is actually coming along fairly well, as opposed to the last season, when the basil that had been planted there before over-seeded and basically took over everything.  I was able to harvest some vegetables yesterday afternoon and my, were they gorgeous!  We got three bell peppers, two little crowns of broccoli, tons of rainbow and red Swiss chard, plus a little dinosaur kale and curly leaf kale.  I cooked all of the greens last night with a little olive oil, sea salt, crushed garlic cloves and crushed red pepper flakes.  They were delicious and I can't really describe how proud I was that I had grown them all myself!  Our garden still has a ways to go (namely, we need to finish planting what seems to be a huge space), but it is really something spectacular to be able to cultivate the ground and consume the "fruits" (or veggies, in this case) of your labor.  Last night, we also enjoyed some really, really late harvest tomatoes (our weather here in Texas has been pretty warm this year; I think the first real freeze is supposed to come in this evening), sliced and sprinkled with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.  They were juicy and exploded with a lovely little taste of summer on our balmy "winter" evening.  In the next few weeks, it looks like I should have more greens to work with, not to mention purple cauliflower, leeks, fennel and, hopefully soon, some beets as well.  I am definitely still more cook than gardener, but it would seem that my thumb, previously black, has begun to show signs of going green!