Coming soon:

Chicken and spinach lasagna with smoked mozzarella, goat cheese salad, black bean and teriyaki chicken burritos, and the easiest cookies you'll ever make- ever.

sorry for the lack of updates, my personal life has hijacked my hobbies for a time.

Meal Schpeal

Hey.

Let's talk about colors.

We could also talk about how creepy my makeupless face looks with my fruit, but no, we're going to talk about colors- specifically about how the more colorful your food is, the better for you it is.* 

Leafy greens contain lutecin, which is excellent for your eyes, and omega-3 fatty acids (who knew?), as well as iron, which is great for my fellow anemics.  Beta-carotene in orangey foods like sweet potatoes and carrots can help lower your risk of heart disease, blues contain antioxidants, and reds specific to tomatoes, cherries, and strawberries, as a dear friend's mother announced the other day, "will give you a healthy prostate!" 

But really, who gives a shit about all of that**, we just want our colors to taste fucking amazing. This is why I am going to help you prepare a colorful, (mostly) nutritious, and balanced meal of Turkey*** and black bean chili, for protein, fiber, and several servings of vegetables, Pluot-Mango-Raspberry-Blackberry salad, for vitamins A and C, and Cheese and Chive cornbread, to keep us from getting too self-righteous and cocky;  we all need a little cornbread in our lives to humble us.

Let's start with the cornbread, since it needs a little more of an hour to bake and cool.  Affectionately nicknamed "crackbread" by a classmate, this deceptively easy recipe is a favorite of my friends and colleagues and something that I make when I don't want to put a lot of effort into cooking but have masochistically signed myself up to feed my classmates or coworkers. 

Cheese and Chive Cornbread:

• One package of cornbread mix, and the ingredients required therein.*

• A cup and a half of shredded extra-sharp cheddar cheese.

• A quarter cup of freshly-cut chives (but the dried ones you'll find in the spice section of your grocery store will do in a pinch).

Follow the directions on your cornbread mix; preheat your oven, get a cake/pie pan greased and ready, put everything the box asks for in a bowl and stir. If the mix asks for oil, as most do, I tend to use olive oil instead of regular vegetable oil in this recipe because I think it tastes that much better. However, I buy my olive oil in bulk so this is not financially irresponsible for me to do (that, and I don't make this terribly often); regular vegetable oil is also fine. 

Wash and cut your chives and finely chop them, then throw them in the mix. Get your sharp cheddar cheese out and grate about a cup and a half of it, setting some aside to sprinkle on top before putting. I was low on cheese when I made this, so I only had about three quarters of a cup. It wasn't quite enough, even though it looked like this before mixing:

Not enough cheese. Seriously.

When you've mixed your batter all together, you want the cheese shreds to be visible. It will look like you have too much cheese, but like I say, you can never have too much cheese. Pour the contents of your mixing bowl into your cake or pie pan), and put that sucker in the oven. Don't worry about if it appears that you don't have a lot of cornbread in the pan, the batter will expand to two or three times its pre-baked size.

Cooking time is going to vary depending on the mix you use and the size and shape of your pan, but there are two ways to tell if your cornbread is done:

1.) Stick a toothpick in the middle, if it comes out mostly clean (as in, without wet batter on it), you're good.

2.) If it has this color (hey, I worked the theme into the unhealthy part of the meal!):

Once your cornbread is cooked, set it on the stove or a heat-safe surface and let it cool to an edible temperature. Since there is a hell of a lot of cheese in this, you won't want to use any butter, just dip it in the chili, which I'll be telling you all about now.

I use a springform pan, which the sides pop off of for faster cooling. If you don't have one (which I didn't until recently), keep your cornbread in the pan it was cooked in while it cools because it will be harder to remove when it's still very hot, not to mention detrimental to your fingers.

Turkey and Black Bean Chili:

•One package of ground turkey OR vegetarian ground round OR soyrizo.****

•Two cans of black beans, drained.

•One large carrot or four or five baby ones.

•One medium-sized tomato.

•Half-cup of washed baby spinach.

•Three chopped artichoke hearts.

•Third-cup of corn.

•Four or five cloves of garlic, chopped finely or mushed through a press.

•One tablespoon of red chili powder (up to three if you want it really spicy)

•Half of a tablespoon of cumin.

•Teaspoon of ground pepper.

•Teaspoon of salt.

•Optional : you can put grated cheese and sour cream on the chili, but it defeats the healthful purpose of this particular dish and isn't really necessary. I do like to put a few pieces of sliced avocado on top to counter the spiciness of the dish, so perhaps I'm a hypocrite. 

 Get a very deep pan or a pot (I personally use a large wok), and set the stove to medium heat. Put your olive oil and garlic in the pan together and move then around a little with a wooden spoon until the bottom of the pan is covered. The olive oil is an excellent vehicle for the garlic, and will bring out the flavor nicely as you add your meat, or non-meat, as it may be. Break the meat up with a wooden spoon, and let it brown a little, adding the chili powder and cumin. While you're waiting for the browning, cut up your carrots.

My exhausted and blotchy self is presenting my choice in vegetables for this- small, mutant carrots and an heirloom tomato from the farmers market. I don't like to buy into the hype of Organic v. Nonorganic, but a farmers market will always have better fresh fruits and vegetables than the supermarket, and if you live in the right areas, they're actually cheaper as well. The trick with these carrots is that they aren't mature enough that you have to peel them, but you are going to want to scrub them until there aren't any more little carrot hairs sticking out of them. Despite the photo of your involved vegetables below, cut the carrots first and add them to the turkey before doing the other vegetables, as they need to cook longer to soften.

Apologies for sad photo quality, as the camera was misbehaving again. Clockwise we have artichoke hearts, spinach, tomatoes, and carrots. Why artichoke hearts? Because I live in the artichoke capital of the world and have a big jar of them. They do wonders for the texture. Also, get a jar- artichokes are delicious, but it's not worth eating a whole one for the heart. Longest caption ever.

Toss in your carrots with the turkey, add the black beans and corn, and let everything simmer on medium heat while you cut everything else up.  Once that's done, stir in everything else. 

Just a' stirrin' my chili, so it doesn't burn, just a' stirrin' my chili, for meat and beans I yearn.

 

Next, toss in all of your vegetables and put a lid on it, but not before you pause to admire your colorful meal to be:

Oh yeah. That's almost as colorful as the fruit salad you're going to make:

Pluot-Mango-Raspberry-Blackberry Fruit Salad:

•Two Parts Pluot

•Two Parts Mango

•One Part Raspberries

•One Part Blackberries

A pluot, for those who may not know, is a hybrid between a plum and an apricot in which the plummy characteristics are more present.

This Magrittean variety is a Sweet Treat pluot (also called "Sweet Green Thing" at my farmers market), which has a green-and-pinkish speckled skin and yellow flesh:

Although apparently my camera sees a lot of red.

 Pluots run the gamut of colors between deep purple and yellow submarine, and they're all pretty good. If pluots aren't available next you, go for a plum. Or an apricot. Really, fruit salad is good no matter what you put in it.

 

Fresh mangoes are amazing- easily in the top ten best foods ever (both the more widely-known large green and red ones or the skinny yellow ones will do- the yellow ones do go bad more quickly) . This is one of those cases where the fresh wildly trumps the frozen fruit, but you really can't go wrong here. Good fruit is good fruit. 

 

Just cut these up and stir.

Now that your meal is complete, set it up, pour yourself some good red wine, and eat the goddamn rainbow.  

You're welcome.

Variation: Use finely cut jalapeño peppers in the place of chives for spicy cornbread.

On a diet?: Skip the cornbread. The rest of this is actually good for you.

Vegan Option: Once again, skip the cornbread, and do the soyrizo/soy ground round thing in the chili.

Boyfriend rating: (in relation to the chili) "This would be really good in a burrito." And that's what he used it for.

*Swedish Fish not included, my beloved.

** I do, as I'm trying to get back into my old jeans. Gym+fruit+???... you know the joke.

***or soyrizo/veggie ground round if you're vegetarian or vegan.

****SOYRIZO IS ALREADY SPICY, AND UNLESS YOU ENJOY THE SENSATION OF YOUR FACE BEING ON FIRE, HALVE THE AMOUNT OF CHILI POWDER AND PEPPER YOU'RE PUTTING IN HERE.

Dark Chocolate-filled Peanut Butter Cookies

Cookies are one of the most universally represented foodstuffs in cooking-related media, so I might as well get into that game right away. These are some of my favorites, and I hope you will enjoy them.

(Note: My camera refuses to work, so most photos have been documented with my phone, making this entry look as though it was presented by David Lynch.)

The ingredients for cookie dough are usually presented in terms of wet and dry ingredients, but this is a misnomer because almost all of the "wet" ingredients are dry until mixed with an egg and butter. I've broken your ingredients down more aptly.

The White Team:

• One cup of flour

• Half teaspoon of baking powder

• Half teaspoon of baking soda

The Beige Team:

• Half cup of chunky peanut butter

• Half cup of butter 

• An egg

• Quarter cup of white sugar

• Three-quarters of a cup of firmly packed brown sugar

• Half teaspoon of vanilla extract

Our Hero:

• A dark chocolate bar

        It looks... zombiefied.

You may be asking "Corinne, do we need a whole pound of chocolate for this recipe?" No, my darlings, a normal sized chocolate bar will do, I just so happen to go though one of these a month because I enjoy a square of dark chocolate in my morning coffee. "But Corinne," my inquisitive reader may pry, "does it have to be dark chocolate?" To which I say yes, but only if you want your cookies to be good. 

The bitterness of dark chocolate makes for an excellent contrast to the sweetness of the cookie it is encased in, while milk chocolate mixed with a peanut butter cookie is something that is too sweet by itself mixed with something else that is too sweet by itself. Then again, I'm not much of a fan of milk chocolate to begin with. You can use milk chocolate (or white chocolate, if you're some kind of pervert), it will just be at the cost of my respect for you.

If you are so fortunate as to have a food processor, you can pretty much throw everything except for the chocolate in and mix it up; if you're like me, you have a fork. I recommend softening the butter and peanut butter to the tune of fifteen seconds in the microwave before mixing them with the rest of the Beige Team. **

Once that is taken care of, slowly add the white team spoon by spoon and mix. VERY FUCKING IMPORTANT: DO NOT USE A WHISK OR YOU WILL CONTEND WITH THIS MONSTROSITY:

Peanut butter makes this so hard to clean.

Now that your dough is mixed, wash your hands as thoroughly as you can (scrub under those fingernails). Leave your hands a little damp and place a tablespoon's worth of dough in your palm.

Then take a square of dark chocolate and stick it in the center of the dough.

Cover the chocolate with a little bit more dough.

Re-wet your hands between cookies to keep dough from sticking to them.

Work the dough around the chocolate until none is showing through, gently mold it into a spherical shape, and place it onto a greased cookie sheet. Allow a few inches between cookies, as they will expand greatly.

Never before has cookie dough looked so unappealing.

Bake these for ten to twelve minutes (until they're brownish around the edges), and let them cool for at least fifteen minutes prior to consumption because the molten chocolate therein is very, very hot. As I mentioned before, these cookies are behemoth, so this recipe only makes about ten (you don't really need more- I'm good with half of one).

Serve these up with a glass of milk- you'll need it.

I do not advise consuming this many unless you're curious about what a triple bypass would be like.

Vegan option: Substitute half a cup of apple sauce for the egg and three tablespoons of vegetable oil for the butter. It might be due to my propensity to always live near a high concentration of hippies, but I've never had trouble finding vegan chocolate when entertaining vegan friends (and in my experience, it is by definition dark chocolate), so try a local specialty food store.

Variations:

• I'm dying to try these with cashew butter instead of peanut, but I rarely can justify cooking these.

• If you don't want to surprise people with ~*secret chocolate*~, bake the dough for about five minutes, create a well in the cookies with the round side of a spoon and then put the chocolate on top and bake for another five.

• Let's add some walnuts. Walnuts are awesome.

Boyfriend rating: "Hey! These have chocolate in them." Weighty pause.  "I'll bet these are delicious, but I've burned  my tastebuds off."

As I said, let them cool, my darlings, let them cool. 

*or you can buy a peanut butter cookie box mix and follow the directions for the dough because this is one of those things where it's a lot easier and almost as good. I won't tell.

**I'm starting to rethink this whole "team" idea, but I'm wholly too lazy to change it.

Smoky Broccoli Cheese Chowder

Oh, primordial soup.

I live by few rules:

 1.) It's better to regret doing something than not doing it.

2.) Always wear nice underwear.

3.) You can never have too much cheese.

Cheese is probably my favorite food, and since it's very easy to consume a massive amount of the stuff in a short amount of time to the already great detriment of my waistline, I often get my cheese fix by pairing it with healthy stuff in a campaign of self-deception, such as the poster child for healthy eating: broccoli.

Broccoli is decidedly not my favorite food so much as one of those things that I eat diligently because I know I'm supposed to. I find it to be completely repulsive raw, and I'll slowly chew through it when cooked while trying to pretend that it's something more palatable because it is my duty to consume it. However, broccoli does make for a fucking amazing companion to cheese in today's dish:

Smoky Broccoli Cheese Chowder

You'll need:

Roughly a cup and a half of broccoli (basically a stalk if you've got the fresh stuff)

A handful of baby carrots or one adult carrot

Half a cup of potato, chopped (this is half a can or just about two baby reds)

One can of condensed cheddar cheese soup

One can of condensed cream of mushroom soup

A small amount of butter

Milk or cream

Extra sharp cheddar cheese

Smoked gouda cheese

A medium-sized pot

A wooden spoon

~

I don't think soup gets enough credit. It's one of those things that people tend to eat half of and neglect and let grow tepid as soon as the main course is on the table. This might not be so much discrimination against soup  as cooks putting less effort into their starter course, knowing that the soup will be overshadowed by whatever else they had made, because "real food" is eaten with a fork. Much like the Dead Kennedys, I subscribe to the idea that soup is good food, and makes for a good meal.

Let's start with your vegetables. Potatoes are the trickiest part of this recipe because if you don't cook them enough, the texture doesn't quite have enough give to it, and if you overcook them, they dissolve and give the soup a grainy feel and a wet, underwhelming potato-y taste. The question boils* down to whether or not you want to use fresh or canned potatoes. In most cases, the fresh vegetables are the obvious choice, but due to the texture issue above, I tend to use chopped canned potatoes in dishes like this one because they already have the perfect texture and just need to be warmed. However, there are advantages to fresh potatoes, namely that they don't have the extra sodium found in canned potatoes, and that they have skin, which is delicious and loaded with iron, vitamin c, and potassium, among other necessary nutrients. 

If you're using fresh potatoes, scrub the skins thoroughly (or peel them if you must, you wuss) and boil them in a small, separate pot. Remove them when a fork easily pierces their surface, but they are still firm and can be lifted from the pot on the fork- if they crumble when forked, you've overdone it. Set them aside to cool- you'll get back to them later.

Next, chop your broccoli. I like to be able to sink my teeth into the vegetables in this soup (which may or may not be indicative of deeper issues), so I cut the broccoli into pieces that are roughly an inch long. If you're using frozen broccoli florets, run them under a little warm water first and you'll be able to pull them apart easily with your fingers. After that, cut your carrots up, and put them and the broccoli into the bottom of the pot. You'll have enough when you can't see the bottom of the pot through your veggies.

There should be twice as many carrots here. I absent-mindedly snacked on some earlier in the day and didn't have a chance to replenish the supply on time for dinner.

If you want to add a little of the onion or celery you'll usually find in mass-produced versions of this soup, be my guest. As I've mentioned, I'm a picky eater. I don't care for onions unless they're completely overwhelmed with other flavors, and I think celery is a joke being played on us by the health food industry, or perhaps God. I have never been able to see the appeal of a fibrous, unchewable stringy stalk that tastes like shit. No, putting peanut butter on it doesn't help, then you just have a fibrous, unchewable, stringy stalk that tastes like shit with peanut butter on it. No thanks, I'll just drop the pretense of health and take the peanut butter as is. Fuck celery. 

Turn the heat on low and add a skinny pat of butter; this will soften your vegetables up a little and prevent them from sticking to the bottom of the pot, and it just tastes nice. Mix everything with a wooden spoon until the vegetables are steaming and nicely coated.

Never cook with metal utensils: they will scratch your pots and pans into ruin.

Now that your vegetables are sufficiently buttered, get your cans of soup out. Turn the heat up a little  past medium and add one can at a time, first the contents of the can, then three quarters of a can of milk. Although  the label on the can says to use equal parts condensed soup and milk, I prefer a thicker soup (and if the soup is still too thin for some reason, a teaspoon of flour or cornstarch will fix that right up). Whole milk or cream probably would be optimal in terms of taste, but I use nonfat and I find it's just fine.

I also like to pretend that the nonfat milk and 98% fat free soup are really going to compensate for the absurd amount of cheese that goes into this.

Put a lid on your pot and let the soup simmer. You do not want it to boil, you just want the surface to shudder from heat. While you're waiting, take your potatoes and cut them into cubes. If you have canned potatoes, drain them and separate half. Once your soup is hot enough, add the potatoes and give it a good stir.

Never store your remaining canned vegetables in the original can because the metal can oxidize and possibly contaminate them. Use tupperware or a bowl with plastic wrap. Your leftover potatoes will be excellent fried up with eggs in the morning.

Finally, we come to the hero of this dish.

Very good cheese, that which separates this soup from the plastic, neon-orange broccoli soup found at chain restaurants with cutesy names the world around. Here I have extra-sharp white cheddar and the smoked gouda that gives the chowder its name. If you can't find it prepackaged, you'll be able to find smoked gouda at your grocery store's deli counter. I get it in slices because it's excellent in a hot sandwich with zucchini and mushrooms on crusty bread (different recipe for a different day), but a block is fine as well. I use three slices of gouda in the soup, which is roughly three ounces, and an equal amount of cheddar. Grating isn't necessary so much as cutting up skinny pieces of cheese because the soup should be hot enough for it all to melt right in- just keep stirring.

The gouda's reddish casing may not melt completely. It's absolutely safe to eat, and being the smokiest part of the smoked gouda, is really quite tasty and has a bacon-esque flavor. If you're really squicked by it, it comes off easily. Stir the soup until pieces of cheese are no longer visible, then pour into bowls and set them up in a way that you find pleasing.

Photo snapped less than a second before my camera's battery died.

I find that this soup is hearty enough to have as a meal and is an excellent companion for toast, and I am told, dark beer.  

Photo taken on my color-hating camera phone.

This recipe serves four people as a main course, six to eight as a side dish, and the leftovers both refrigerate and freeze well. If you want to use your leftovers for something other than a  bowl of soup, they make for a good sauce poured over chicken and noodles.

Variations:

-Like it hot? Use a chipotle based hot sauce to bring out the smokiness.

-On a diet? You probably shouldn't eat this, but if you really want to, lose the cheddar cheese soup and opt for another can of fat free cream of mushroom and half the amount of cheese. Get the sharpest cheddar cheese you can get because the flavor will go so much farther and you won't have to use as much cheese.

-Fucking sick of questions? I've considered making an asparagus and swiss soup by substituting asparagus for broccoli, another can of mushroom for the cheddar cheese, and using six ounces of good emmental or jarlsberg cheese instead of the cheddar and gouda.  However, a couple of months spent living in Paris where swiss cheese is literally in everything put me off of the stuff to the point that I can't yet bring myself to buy it. If anyone wants to try, let me know how it goes.

Boyfriend rating: "Good soup, but what's the main course?"

I guess you can't win them all.

*pun only intended as an afterthought, har har.

Hello,

I'm Corinne, and we're going to be cooking together.

I love food.  Necessity aside, food is a source of immense and visceral pleasure, matched only by sex and art*. 

Despite my love of food, I am one of the pickiest eaters I know.  I'm deathly serious when I say that this is one of my worst qualities, and one of the worst qualities a person can have- a friend with whom I took a course in Dante was inspired to write an essay about how there should be a circle in hell for finicky eaters, the contrapasso for which is being force-fed mass amounts of one's most hated foods. Despite my acknowledged deservingness of being spoon fed globs of mayonnaise by the hounds of hell, it was my desire to have my food exactly as I like it that caused me to take up whisk and spatula many years ago, and soon thereafter, I found myself making food for reasons other than avoiding yet another family dinner of fish sticks and peas. 

Food can be used as a tool for celebration, to bring comfort to the bereaved, and as a means of breaking down barriers between people (and cultures, sure, if you want to go there).  The creation of food is an equally excellent venue for expressing love and venting frustration. On a good day, I'll put on one of my favorite aprons and a pair of heels and sing along to some fantastic music while lovingly whisking together a batter. On a bad day, I will ferociously chop vegetables until they no longer bear any resemblance to their natural state while muttering my grievances to myself. No matter my mood, cooking itself is therapudic**, a meditation in which the end result plays only a minor role.

When talk of food preparation comes up among my peers, more often than not I am met with squirming and the meek admission: "I can't cook."

This, my darlings, is bullshit. 

Sure, not everyone can taste a dish while still in a primordial, unfinished state and detect the exact missing ingredient necessary to bring out the best possible flavors (although this ability improves with practice, patience, and the occasional mistake). However, when it comes to the mechanics of throwing food together in a pleasing combination, I subscribe to the belief that anyone who can read can cook; it just takes a little time, the willingness to accept the possibility of failure, and the willingness to not let the aforementioned failure prevent future attempts at creating something great. 

The purpose of this blog is to provide easy recipes for people who don't necessarily have a gourmet kitchen or a gourmet budget (as I don't). As much as I love food, I'm not a snob about it, and ingredients may be frozen, canned, or out of a box, and more often than not, you will see the same ingredients used again and again simply because that is what I have bought to eat for the week***. The healthiness of foods presented here will correlate directly with how much time I've been spending at the gym or how emotionally volatile and full of estrogen I am on a given day.

Most of all, I hope that you will find something good to eat and gain the courage to step up to the stove and shine. 

*which encompasses music and literature as well as more visual forms of expression.

**Not a real word, according to blogger who thinks we all just need to suck it up.

***Expect a lot of spinach.