Healthy Snacking!

Saturday was quite the adventurous day. I am not joking, just keep reading and you'll find out why.

First of all, I woke up and had delicious queso fundido. Its just melted cheese from the mcirowave, but this was with authentic Oaxaca cheese. Yes, I did bring some from Mexico, and yes I have been eating it lately since I do not want it to go bad.

So anyways, after breakfast, I just bummed around for a bit (it was gross weather outside). Then, after giving it much thought, I decided to make one of the biggest purchases of my life. I bought a NEX-3 Sony compact camera.

Quite an investment let me tell you, but so far I am loving it and I think it was good use of my money. That was adventure number one of the day: spending a chunk of my life savings on a gadget.

Then, I came home, went about my day normally and hoped that the rain stopped before the NKOTBSB concert at Fenway Park. It kind of did, at least for a while.

Now here comes the start of the not so cool adventures. As I am leaving to the concert, I decide to run back to switch my sweater for a trench coat-- quite a stupid decision let me tell you because if I was about to switch my sweater for something that would help if it rained, a hoodless trench coat was not it-- and I forget my keys inside of the apartment.

Forgetting my keys when my roommate is not here had been my GREATEST fear for quite a while. I know the consequences are not so bad (I have tons of friends with places I could crash), but I am OCD, and it really does make me angry to forget my keys. Anyways, I ended up making it back into my apartment in time to go out and enjoy the rest of my Saturday night.

So despite everything that happened this weekend, I managed to maintain some normality: cooking and writing pieces for my internship. I made two simple sides that also happen to be very healthy. Enjoy!

Butternut Squash Fries (adapted from Hungry Girl)

• 1 butternut squash
• Cooking spray
• S & P

1. Preheat oven to 425 F
2. Cut off the ends of the squash and slice in half widthwise. Peel butternut squash. Cut bottom half lengthwise and spoon out the seeds.
3. Cut butternut squash into 1/2 inch wide spears and pat with paper towels to remove excess moisture. Lay spears over paper towels and sprinkle with salt. Let sit for 5 minutes and pat again.
4. Spray a baking sheet with cooking oil and distribute spears evenly. Sprinkle with S & P.
5. Bake fries for 40 minutes, carefully flipping them over halfway through.

Braised Celery (adapted from How To Cook Everything)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 .5 lbs. celery, trimmed and sliced into 2-inch pieces
• S & P
• 1 cup chicken stock
• Fresh parsley, chopped, for garnish

1. Preheat oven to 375 F.
2. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat and cook celery for about 2 minutes. Season with S & P. 
3. Add chicken stock and bring to a boil. Place skillet in the oven and cook until almost all the liquid is evaporated and celery is very tender, about 15 minutes. If liquid evaporates before celery is tender, add more stock.
4. Serve with chopped parsley as garnish.

Mustard Glazed Turnips

Remember when I thought I was not going to be busy during the summer? Turns out I was mistaken. I have been writing and writing and writing (stories and essays) non-stop this weekend. I am not kidding. But in the end it will all pay off.

So far I have loved the assignments I have gotten at my internship. I am actually reporting and writing for a newspaper. Exciting right? At least in my book it is.

Anyways, my messed up class schedule paired up with my quasi-journalism life has made it hard for me to blog on a regular basis, but there is always time to cook, and therefore time to blog as well. My summer will consist of easy-to-make recipes designed to feed one person: me.

But first let me tell you a little bit about the past few days, which have been out of the ordinary (I feel like I have been saying this often and it makes me happy to think that my life is taking good an unexpected turns). Weekdays have been boring and completely scheduled: wake up, go for a run (almost everyday), get breakfast on my way to class, come home and do some homework or take a nap, go to class again, and finally come home to sleep (yes, some might say I have turned into an old lady).

Enough with the talk about me. On Saturday I went to the Roslindale Farmer's Market and bought fresh turnips (a first). I came home and immediately felt inspired to make some yummy dish out of them. Here is the recipe.

Mustard Glazed Turnips (adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1.5 lbs. of Hakuri turnips (or other root vegetables such as radishes), cut into bite size pieces
• S & P
• 1 cup chicken or vegetable broth
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1. Place olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add vegetables and cook for about 10 minutes, or until beginning to brown.
2. Add sugar and enough broth to cover all the vegetables. Bring mixture to a boil and cook until mixture is almost completely reduces, about 20 minutes. Vegetables should look glossy and a syrup should form. 
3. Add mustard and stir until dissolved and vegetables are covered. Serve hot or cold.

And yes, I did indeed pair these veggies up with grilled shrimp and salad, two of my current obsessions.

Sopa de Tortilla

I never realized how much I missed soup until last night. Soups are one of my favorite dishes, and I don't have them enough here in Boston.

I grew up with large three-course lunches. Soup followed by meat and side, followed by dessert; dinner on the other hand would be just a simple quesadilla or a bowl of cereal. When I came to the US I had to adopt a whole new way of eating, scratch that, I am still trying to adopt it. I am slowly adapting to the small-lunch-large-dinner way of eating, but I still find myself confused when its mid-afternoon and I'm suddenly starving since I had a small lunch. 

Anyways, there's two reasons why I don't have soup as much here as I do at home. First of all, soup takes a while to make. It's not very hard to make, but it takes time and organization. And then there's the fact that I'm not used to having a large dinner. Its weird enough to have a large dish for dinner, and adding soup to the mix just confuses me even more. 

But yesterday I found the solution: soup can be a meal on its own. 

I am happy to say that after my success making tortilla soup yesterday, you will be seeing many more steaming bowl of soup around here from now on.

Ok, so now the specifics. The roomie was craving tortilla soup last night, so I grabbed my How To Cook Everything book and looked it up. Yes, I know I should've just called my mom and asked her for a Mexican recipe instead, but the book was so convenient and it definitely paid off.

The recipe is pretty easy to follow and with a few tweaks it turned out to be just like a traditional sopa de tortilla.

Tortilla Soup (adapted from How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman)

• 2 chiles (jalapeno, cayenne or any other depending on how hot you want the soup)
• 1 1/2 lbs. tomatoes without core and halved
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 1 large onion thinly sliced
• 1 large shallot chopped
• S & P
• 4 cups chicken stock
• Tortilla strips (see recipe below)
• Cheese and sour cream (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 500 F or turn on broiler. Place chiles and tomatoes on baking sheet and roast until charred. Flip over and roast again, about 15 minutes total (if you don't have a broiler). Remove from oven. Once cooled, remove seed from chiles and chop. 
2. In a large pot heat oil over medium heat. Add onions and shallots and cook until golden and soft, about 5 minutes. Add tomatoes and chiles and season with S & P.
3. Mash tomatoes with the back of a spoon (wooden preferably) and stir to combine. Add chicken stock and adjust heat so that soup simmers. Cook for about 20-30 minutes while simmering.
4. Serve hot with tortilla strips, sour cream, and cheese.

Tortilla Strips

• Corn tortillas (each one yields about 24 strips)
• Cooking oil

1. Preheat oven to 400 F. Stack tortillas and cut into 1/2 strips. Cut strips again so that they are about 1 - 1 1/2 inch in length.
2. Place tortilla strips on rimmed baking sheet and spray with cooking oil. Cook in oven for about 10 minutes, shaking and rotating baking sheets halfway through.
3. Let cool and serve with soup.

Snicker Doodle Butter Cookies

One of my mom's favorite cookies is the snicker doodle. Every time we go to Aspen, she'll go straight to Paradise Bakery and buy herself a freshly baked chewy snicker doodle.

We have tried time and time again to find a recipe for anything resembling those cookies. We have failed time and time again. But right before srping, I found a recipe in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything for Butter Cookies.

The recipe seemed easy and quick (something necessary when I decide to bake between classes) and it  boasted an array of add-in possibilities that appealed to me immediately. I could basically add anything I wanted and create any kind of butter-based cookie I wanted.
I took the easy way out, just adding cinnamon and sugar to the cookies before baking, but I am proud to say that I have found a way to recreate the delicious snicker doodles!

The cookies look a bit unappealing, but wait until you get a bite of one of them and prepare to become addicted (seriously, I ate like 5 in one sitting). I will be trying to perfect these when I come back from Spring Break so that I can surprise my mom with a delicious Paradise-like batch.

ANd in the hopes of making it into Technorati ... 2NCPBEJXEUDC

 

Snicker Doodle Butter Cookies (adapted from Mark Bittman's Butter Cookies)

• 1 stick unsalted softened butter
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• A pinch of salt
• 1/4 cup milk (more if needed)
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 375 F. In a large bowl cream butter and sugar (use an electric mixer if you have one). Add the vanilla and egg, and beat until well blended.
2. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Add half the dry ingredients to the butter mix and beat for a moment. Add the milk and beat for about 10 seconds. Add remaining dry ingredients, and more milk if necessary, in order to make a dough that is soft enough to be dropped from a spoon.
3. Combine cinnamon and 2 tablespoons sugar in a small bowl and set aside.
4. Drop tablespoons of dough about 3 inches apart on a ungreased baking sheet. Sprinkle each cookie with the cinnamon mixture. Bake cookies until edges are browned, about 10 minutes. Cool cookies and then transfer to rack to cool completely. Cookies can be stored in air tight container for about a week.

Fresh Baguette & Turkey

On Monday morning, I stopped at Barnes & Nobles (pretending I wasn't going to buy anything) and came out with the coolest cookbook ever. How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

When I got home and started reading the book (I actually read the whole intro and everything) I started to get more and more excited. Today, I went to Borders and bought two more books. Bon Appetit Fast Easy Fresh, and a cookie book that I will introduce later. 

Anyways, tonight I made turkey and bread. There's nothing as rewarding as warm freshly baked bread waiting to be dipped into olive oil and eaten. Yum.

The turkey was good too... (I'm kidding, it was great!)

French Baguette (from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman)

• 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast

*The recipe asks for a food processor, but since I don't have one, I just used my hands.

1. Put the flour, salt, and yeast in a big bowl. Add 1 cup of water and knead until dough is formed. If needed, keep adding water by the tablespoon. You want the dough to be moist but not too wet. If you add too much water, add more flour to balance.
2. Leave dough in bowl to rise, covered with plastic, at least an hour (up to three hours at room temperature).
3. Once dough has risen, transfer to a lightly floured surface and form bread. (I made three baguettes so that I could freeze two and eat one tonight). Let dough rise covered with a towel for another hour or two.
4. Preheat the oven to 400 F. Slash the bread with a sharp knife to make diagonal cuts. Transfer baguette to a lightly oiled baking sheet (or pizza stone if you have one). Lower heat to 375 F and bake bread until golden brown.

Roast Boneless Turkey Breast with Fennel (adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman)

• 2 fennel bulbs, both trimmed, one sliced and the other finely chopped.
• 2 tablespoons olive oil + 1 to grease pan
• 1 tablespoon ginger paste
• S & P
• 1 turkey breast*
• 1 cup orange juice

*(I really don't know how much the one that I used weighed since it had been in my freezer since Thanksgiving. Oops!)

1. Heat the oven to 450F. Put 2 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When oil is hot, add the sliced fennel and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, or until soft. Add ginger paste and S & P and cook until fennel is slightly browned. Remove from heat and cover to keep warm.
2. While fennel is cooking, grease a baking dish with remaining olive oil. Add chopped fennel and sprinkle some salt. Place turkey on baking dish and sprinkle some more salt. Add orange juice. 
3. Cook turkey in the oven for about 30-35 minutes or until its almost done (155-165F if you have a thermometer). Add sliced fennel and return dish to the oven for 5 more minutes, or until turkey is done.