Help, help, I'm drowning!

Not in water, nor in work, but in an addiction. I'm addicted to recipes. Recipes, you say? But recipes are good! I like recipes! Yeah, me too, but this is getting out of hand. I very reluctantly hit the "delete" button on FoodGawker in my Google Reader today, and I had to keep saying to myself "this is the right thing to do, this is good." Because let's face it. The point of copying all these recipes diligently into my database is supposedly that I can have a lot of great things to cook. But I don't have time to cook, I certainly don't have time to plan meals, and lately I haven't had time to blog or leave comments or enjoy this community that I'm in because I've been so busy diligently going through my reader, bookmarking recipes, and then importing them one-by-one into YummySoup. This seriously has to stop. In the interest of catching up a little, I've trimmed back so that I'm only using Tastespotting and the individual blogs I like, and I'm only copying recipes that are actually unique or really something I want, and I'm using this post to dump some of the photos that I'd like to blog about but let's be honest - I don't even remember how I made these things from September or October! So it's not quite cold turkey, but it's a start, and maybe I'll even dig into some of the wonderful cookbooks I own and sit down and plan some meals, instead of getting swept so heavily into the hurricane force winds that are the internet.



This was a sort of middle eastern-style toss up I made with roasted eggplant, yoghurt, lemon, onion, parsley, and dill. I'm becoming very attached to plain yoghurt, and I tried to have some vanilla the other day for breakfast and it was just painfully sweet. Maybe that's good news for my sugar addiction.



In case you ever wondered how I normally start my day, this is it. I'm still addicted to Adagio, though I'll admit that Mighty Leaf ginger twist and rainforest maté are tasty enough that I considered going back to them just for those two at the Christmas sale. The multigrain cheerios are my normal starter, except in the dead of winter, and I have six boxes in my closet from a sale at the grocery store.



I never did give you a final verdict on the Sachertorte. I liked it, though next time more apricot jam. It was predictably dry, as European cakes are, but the Schlag always fixes that. The Austrian professor was happy that I'd remembered it, though he did mention that he has Sachertorte for breakfast every morning. Psh. How was I to know?



Before cutting back on sugar, I went on a bit of a Choxie binge. Their chocolate isn't cheap, but I do highly recommend this key lime thing, which has bits of graham cracker in it, as well as all their various espresso/coffee flavours and the cake flavoured truffles. You can get Choxie at Target.



Rita and I had a seminar together this semester, and she came over one day to work on our research together and put together this lovely little spinach salad.



I meant to take my camera with me when my friend Matt and I finally got a chance to try out Seoul Grille, but I didn't, so behold leftovers. It was actually quite good, though I had to do some bargaining since there wasn't anything vegetarian on the menu. Fortunately, they could do this dish with tofu and without the egg, which I didn't really want. There were lovely bits of marianated seitan (or maybe it was tempeh) and all sorts of vegetables to throw in (or eat alone).



This tasted better than it looks, but you have to admit that the combination of blue cheese and caramelized onions is a good one.

Spring has sprung!

Finally. The weather is still very finnicky here, but we got what I think is the last snow of the season last week. In Turkish, my teacher asked me when summer comes in Iowa and I said "hiç bir zaman gelmiyor" (It never comes). I am still in tea paradise, though the birthday tea sample I got with my order is less than impressive. Pictured is the first glass of sweet tea of the year. Hurrah! My foolproof sweet tea recipe is this. Dump about four to six inches of sugar in a pitcher. You kind of have to eyeball it. Heat three cups of water, or so. Stir into pitcher with wooden spoon until sugar dissolves. Add two Lipton's Iced Tea Brew teabags. Let sit five or six minutes. Remove bags and fill pitcher with cold water. Refrigerate several hours. Serve over ice.

As I said, I'm completely impressed with the cinnamon tea from Adagio, but I just realised today that it's the same cinnamon tea I'm obsessed with from House of Aromas. Good to know, since they charge nearly two dollars for a cup of it, and it's much much cheaper than that if you just buy a tin and make your own. I also got a cup of apricot tea today and it was less than impressive. It was bitter, and I suspect they brewed it too long. Speaking of unimpressive things, always check labels before buying for the ubiquitous phrase "cheesefood." This cheese with caraway seeds is horribly processed-tasting. The caraway is the only good thing.

It was tolerable as pictured, melted on potato pancakes. Then again, at the end of Passover, you start getting desperate. One of my Passover plans was to make squash casserole, and that didn't happen so much. I had picked a recipe, but I didn't realise that you have to steam the squash and then bake it. It was pretty warm that week, and I did not want to heat up my kitchen nearly that much. But still, I had five yellow squash on my hands and needed to do something with them.

So, I decided to improvise. This goat cheese is from France and it's amazing. Delicious taste and a creamy texture, as goat cheese should be. I decided that I would roast the squash in the oven without pre-steaming, along with some chopped green onion, and then I would dot it with goat cheese when it came out. I was a little worried, though, that the squash would be too dry if I didn't steam in advance.

Thankfully, I was wrong. Yellow squash has so much water in it that it made no difference. It browned a bit on the outside but remained very moist on the inside. The green onion wasn't the best idea, or at least, I should've added it towards the end of the roasting time. Half an hour in a hot oven made the onion dry and brown, and killed a lot of the flavour. Oops.

The goat cheese did pair well with the squash, although maybe I would've put it with a drier vegetable if I was thinking a bit more clearly. I did think the seed pattern in this squash was pretty excellent. It makes me think of this famous tree... is it the boddhisatva? Anyone know? There's some sort of a tree that looks like this, in any event.

So, to break the Passover week, I decided to do a roast asparagus recipe that called for cornstarch. It was a good way to use up the orange and lemons that I bought and hadn't used yet, and I figured roasting again would heat up the kitchen less than some other methods. I used the recipe found here, but I had a little less orange juice and a little more lemon. It was quite tart, but I enjoyed the combination. I served it on top of (sadly not homemade) mashed potatoes with almonds on top. Yum!

Finally, I have one more cheese review for you. This is an Appenzeller cheese, which Wikipedia tells me comes from northeast Switzerland and is cured with an herbal brine. The cheese is very strong, and I wouldn't recommend it if you're on a date or something, but I love it. It has a sort of nutty flavour, and is very distinctive. I didn't try it with anything else; just ate slices straight off the block. Sometimes, that's the best!

Teagasmic

I will post a real post tomorrow, but this can't wait.

The lovely miss Stephanie passed along a gift certificate to Adagio Teas and my package arrived today. I got the $19 tea starter kit, though I am a tea veteran, because it comes with the niftiest way to brew tea ever. But what I'm raving about is the cinnamon tea, which is perfect. Naturally strong and sweet, which is how I love it, and full of flavour. Mighty Leaf had been falling flat for me, and this renews my faith in tea.

Want to try it? Leave a comment or e-mail me at judithavory@gmail.com with your e-mail address. I'll pass on the love with a $5 certificate. Want to try my own Tropical Nut blend? Click here. You can create your own, too!

What's New

This is going to be a rare post for me - no photos, no recipes - but I think in my usual posts I miss a bit of the general food-related banter I so enjoy in other blogs, and miss the opportunity to do some stream-of-conscious narrating (an exercise I've always enjoyed).

Right now I'm in a major period of transition. First, in August I moved to a new apartment and a new kitchen. You'll notice from my photographs that my dishes have changed, as have many of my kitchen utensils. I don't have a dishwasher, which has made me a bit lazier. I also started a job near a large chain grocery store, which means those modern temptations (mainly frozen pizza and chocolate bars) have crept into my diet, and I haven't been frequenting New Pi nearly as often. The new job and the new semester also mean less time to cook, and I've been buying less fresh vegetables which means that when I am inspired I don't have much to work with. As a consequence, a lot of my cooking experiments lately have been not from cookbook recipes but rather brought-on by the food blogging challenges I've become so fond of these past couple of months.

Well, a lot of that is (hopefully) changing. Things are settling down a bit at school, and the warm weather is coming to an end. That means hot food is much, much more appealing. I got my tea order for the season from Mighty Leaf, and I'm already in love with the Earl Grey and the new Ginger Twist. I think I missed the latest SHF deadline for the fig challenge, but I have a container of dried figs and I'm considering trying a fig jam that somehow incorporates brewed tea. I've been copying down recipes religiously for quite a while from some of my favourite blogs (at some point I hope to do a little link post about those) and I plan to start cooking them soon enough. The Farmer's Market has a lot more now, so I'm going to try to pick some fresh veggies up until the frost kicks in, and finally, I've gone back to Weight Watchers.

I haven't been eating healthfully at all over the summer, so you wouldn't know it from looking at me, but I did Weight Watchers sort of unofficially (didn't want to pay for the meetings) for six months and lost fifty pounds. I stopped counting points and gained some weight as a consequence, but now I'm going back. Besides the weight benefit, I'm hoping this will have a positive effect on my budget - eating less means that I can justify buying semi-expensive ingredients, and making somewhat fancy things. Granted, I'm going to have to knock off the home baked desserts a bit, but I hope to keep doing SHF and maybe some other challenges as well. I'm thinking of starting a vegetarian food blog challenge as well... just have to think of what to call it!