I took the plunge…

…into self-hosting! Ahhh! The blog has migrated over to Daria Can Cook (www.dariacancook.com/blog).

I was tired of my long long long URL, and Summer has officially ended, so I figured it was time to switch things up. Only after I paid for the new account did I realize that I totally bit Homegirl’s style. Ack! Sorry Homegirl! Your way with words is clearly infectious.

So, to recap: think before you commit to a domain name, and follow me to Daria Can Cook!

Experimental Kitchen Love

There’s something you should know about me. I like to live dangerously. That’s right; I’m the kind of girl who toys recklessly with recipes’ hearts, tossing aside ingredients and cooking times like so much confetti. This drives Trent wild, and not in the good way. He likes to follow recipes precisely, and I have a hard time convincing him that my substitutions and fiddlings are good ideas.

He’s often right. If consistency is your goal, then messing around with tried and true formulas is not a good idea. But if you live for the highs of surprising flavor combinations and don’t mind sinking down into the scorched, bland, over-seasoned lows of culinary failures, then experimentation can be your friend.

Tonight, my approach won out. We’d planned to do something with our acorn squash, some of our greens, a can of garbanzos, and maybe some potatoes. When I came home and opened my google reader, however, I found a recipe for vegetarian molé from Michelle at Find Your Balance. It could be adapted to fit nearly everything we were thinking of cooking tonight. Sign from the google gods? Clearly!

Of course, we didn’t have pinto beans. Or delicata squash. Or kale or canned tomatoes or regular almonds. We did have garbanzos, not quite enough acorn squash to make the required 3 cups, swiss chard and celery greens, non-canned tomatoes and tomatillos with some added water, and chocolate-covered almonds from Trader Joe’s. So we made do and came up with this:

 

And you know what? It was great. Sure, there are things I’ll do differently next time (more squash, no celery [what was I thinking there??], less chocolate, even though we used about 1/3 of what the recipe called for), but I think there will be a next time. And that’s what experimentation is all about: falling in love with things whose existence you hadn’t even dreamed of.

What’s your cooking style? Are you reckless and experimental? Or do you stick to the well-lighted paths of recipes?

Harvest Season: A Cornucopia of Veggies

I wish I had a real cornucopia in which to display this week’s haul. One of these days I’ll have a kitchen/studio with space to store unnecessary things like cornucopias.

For some reason I keep expecting our CSA share to dwindle, even though autumn IS harvest season. And boy was it ever a big harvest this week!

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

That would add up to lettuce, Swiss chard, mustard greens, unidentified green, cilantro, long beans, tomatillos, a lone carrot, hot peppers, bell peppers, miraculous (but grade B) tomatoes, jilo eggplant (insanely bitter – I love bitter things but I have not acquired a taste for these!), ACORN SQUASH, which is my e’erything, PLUS unpictured ginormous leeks, a billion ears of sweet corn, onions, and potatoes.

I will do my best to do creative things with these beauties this week. I’ve fallen into a salad/cooked greens/raw veggie snack rut that I need to get out of. A large part of why I started blogging was to force myself to be more creative and varied in the kitchen, after all. So stay tuned for my attempts at de-rut-ifying myself!

Comfort Food

Do you know what I like? Coming home from a day of reading-until-my-eyes-might-fall-out and teaching-until-my-head-might-explode to find this waiting for me:

That Trent is something special. He even photographed it for the blog!

The meatballs consist of CSA lean, hormone- and antibiotic-free, grass-fed, free-range beef and whatever else the Joy of Cooking told Trent to add. They taste divine.

Come back tomorrow to see this week’s veggie haul. Things are getting interesting now that the seasons are changing!

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut(butter)

As you can probably tell from my lack of posting, school has been keeping me from food-related pursuits. Eats have been simple and quick and have included more than a few dinners eaten in meetings. Blech.

This morning I made an effort to get back into the kitchen. I eased into it with my trusty food processor, which gets an almost daily workout (smoothies, hummus, blended spinach for oats, etc., etc.). In went half a bag of Trader Joe’s roasted, unsalted cashews and a bit of salt. Out came this:

Isn’t it beautiful?

Trent was thrilled; he quickly made some toast for his cashew-butter vehicle. I chopped up an apple, which baked in the toaster oven for 10 minutes or so, then added the apple, a generous dollop of cashew butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg to my morning oats. No picture because seriously, how many pictures of oatmeal can one look at in a lifetime? But rest assured it was fabulous. I highly recommend adding baked apples, cinnamon, and cashew butter to everything you eat for the next few weeks.

P.S. How awesome is Trent for taking pictures for me with his beautiful new toy camera?

Squashed

Today’s post has a soundtrack. I recommend playing Drake’s** “Best I Ever Had” as you read.

You know a lot of [vegetables] be thinkin’ my songs are about them
This is not to get confused, this one’s for you

Baby, you my everything, you all I ever wanted
We can do it real big, bigger than you ever done it
[Butter] up on everything, other [spreads] ain’t never on it
I want this forever, I swear I can spend whatever on it

 

She make me [sautee] it till she give [her sugars] up
And I say the same thing every single time

I say you the you the best, you the you the best
You the you the best, you the you the best
You the best I ever had, best I ever had

 

see this the type of [breakfast]
You got to dedicate to somebody
Just make sure they that special somebody

 

So this one’s for you, squash. You the you the best.

 

Songwriters: Butternut Squash (lunch, consumed with pb and cinnamon); Summer Squash (breakfast, consumed with spinach oats, fried egg, lactose-free muenster, and Sriracha)

**Who else recognizes Drake from his days playing Jimmy on Degrassi: The Next Generation? I know I’m not the only one who loves that show.

Giveaways!

Just checking in to alert you to some excellent giveaways. I’ll be back later in the week with more CSA goodness and some real cooking.

First, Lynn and Christy at The Actors Diet are giving away some Amazing Grass goodies here. Next up, Chocolate-Covered Katie is giving away some Green Super Food bars from the Amazing Grass company. Check them out!

Here’s to the dawn of an excellent new week!

A Lovely, Lovely Prize

I’m finally back with this week’s veggie CSA haul. It’s one of the biggest ones yet, and it includes a fall treat I’m super excited about!

Nope, not those…

Not those either…

Getting closer…

Can you see it?

There it is! On the right! A BUTTERNUT SQUASH!

Plus a beautiful bunch of kale:

For lunch today I made use of a summer squash leftover from last week (so many veggies! so little time!), the new kale, and some of the cherry toms to get this snacky plate:

I definitely felt a little Snackface-y, especially because I sauteed the kale in a dry skillet so they crisped up into kale chips. I was kind of skeptical about kale chips, but WOW are they good! They explode into little crispy bites of heavenly greenness in your mouth. I will definitely be making these again.

For dinner tonight we did a pasta dish with CSA spicy Italian sausage, stir-fried eggplant, long beans (amazing texture!), more cherry toms, and hot pepper. It was so good I forgot to take a picture!

This was purportedly our last week of summer bounty. Our share continues through November, so we’re looking forward to hardier fare like root veggies and (thankfully) kale. I’m excited for the change of seasons! And I’m excited to be writing a blog post – I’ve missed doing this during my busy busy school days! Thanks to those of you who have still be visiting and commenting – you’re the best!

Kitchen Photography

Trent got a new toy. Any guesses what it is?

He got a beautiful new camera that (I think) makes our food look much prettier than my trusty but limited Fujifilm point-and-shoot. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to convince him to let me use it, but I’ll try!

Pictured here: tonight’s dinner. Collards, eggplant, an heirloom tomato, and jalapeno (all CSA, of course) sauteed in the chicken fat leftover from our CSA chicken legs. Delish!

I’ve also been eating lots of SIABs (smoothie in a bowl – acronym courtesy of Kath).

Frozen banana, berry/cherry mix, sunflower seed butter, spinach (hence the greenish tinge around the edge), almond milk, food processored and topped with shredded coconut. Not as pretty as above pictures because taken with my Fuji. Ah well!

You may have noticed that it’s been quiet around here for a few days and that I haven’t been commenting very much. It’s super busy at school for me right now, so I’m afraid the blog has to take a back seat for a bit. I’ll still be posting and commenting, but not as much as usual. Once things calm down I’m hoping to do some site redesigning and revamping. So bear with me until then!

Happy happy almost weekend!

Kitchen Firsts

We’ve been accumulating large amounts of ground beef in our freezer thanks to our meat CSA. In an effort to make a dent in our stash, I made a veggie-stuffed meatloaf. This was my first meatloaf making attempt (though not my first Meatloaf experience – I’ve been know to rock this at karaoke bars), and it wasn’t too shabby. I combined a few different recipes to come up with the following:

Veggie-Stuffed Meatloaf

For the meat layers:

2 lbs ground beef

2 small potatoes, grated

1 carrot, grated

1/2 an onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 tbsp rolled oats

1 egg

1 tsp each salt and pepper

2 tsp soy sauce

dash of Sriracha

For the veggie layer:

spinach and shitake mushrooms (or greens/mushrooms/etc. of your choosing)

For the top layer:

ketchup

 

Method:

(1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

(2) Combine all of the ingredients for the meat layers in a large bowl. When well-combined, put half of the mixture in a pan (I used an 8” square pyrex).

(3) Top with a few handfuls of spinach and chopped mushrooms (I’d say I used half a bag of spinach and a whole container of mushrooms).

(4) Put the remaining meat mixture on top of the veggies. Brush desired amount of ketchup on top of the meat. Bake for 45 minutes.

(5) Enjoy this:

 

 

I think that next time I will use a larger pan so that I can add more veggies. The spinach shrunk considerably (as it is wont to do), so there wasn’t quite as much roughage as I was hoping for. All in all, though, not bad for a first meatloaf!

To balance out this meat-fest, I also tried my hand at black bean burgers. This was another kitchen first for me! I love bean burgers, but I’ve only ever had them when eating out. Following Matt the No Meat Athlete’s suggestion, I used the recipe at Mama’s Weeds. Here’s what I got:

These were crazy delicious, but as you can see, I could not for the life of me get them to stay together! Anyone with bean-burger-making experience have a remedy for my falling apart problem?

I didn’t sweat it, of course; I doused my burger in ketchup and went to town.

Enjoyed with a baked sweet potato. Trader Joe’s tells me that this is a yam, but Mark Bittman tells me that yams are incredibly rare in the U.S. and that virtually everything marketed as a yam is actually a sweet potato. True yams can grow to weigh 100 pounds. Can you even imagine 100 pounds of yam??

Hope everyone’s having a fabulous labor day! Enjoy the day off if you’ve got it.