Greek Pizza Recipe

Last night Ray came over and we had Greek pizza, a first attempt for us. Jason used to order it at California Pizza Kitchen and loved it, but usually I don't have the ingredients at home. Actually, I didn't last night either, but he stopped by the store on the way home from work and got everything we needed (basically everything listed below).

Ingredients:

• Tzatziki sauce (blend one cucumber with about 3/4 cup plain yogurt and add some dill)
• A cheap steak, sliced very thin and pan-fried with spices like coriander and oregano, then cut into small pieces
• Feta cheese
• Tomatoes, sliced thin
• Mozzarella
• Canned artichoke hearts (I used 3-4), sliced thin
• Lettuce, chopped

I'm sure kalamata olives would be delicious on top, too. But with last weekend's sickness, let's just say I was not eager to eat olives again this soon.

Sprinkle olive oil over the dough and then a thin layer of Tzatziki, then cover with a thin layer of mozzarella, add the meat and tomatoes and artichoke hearts and sprinkle the feta on top, bake, and then add lettuce and more Tzatziki sauce as desired. It might not look like much in the photo, but it's the best pizza we've ever made. I'm going to go eat some leftovers right now...

Ramen

Jason brought back miso and ramen noodles ("chewing taste," says the packaging - mmm) from Denver this weekend, so I could finally make homemade ramen.

It's not that hard. Cook some chicken, add miso paste to some chicken broth, cook some vegetables, cook the ramen noodles in the broth, and mix it all together. The result is pretty tasty.

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I based my ramen off this recipe, but meant to follow this chicken miso soup recipe.

Here's my more detailed ramen recipe:

1. Boil a chicken breast (bone still in is good) in a small pot of water on medium heat till fully cooked and soft. (I added a garlic clove, some dried chili pepper, and ginger to the water.)

2. While the chicken is cooling a bit, bring 4 cups of chicken broth plus 2 cups of water to a boil. Stir in the miso. (I only put about 1 teaspoon, which wasn't enough - probably need at least 1 tablespoon.)  Add some carrots sliced into slivers and cook for about 7-10 minutes.

3. Optional: in a small skillet, cook some frozen corn with a little butter and chili. Or saute some other vegetable that sounds good. Corn is probably not too authentic for a Japanese dish.

4. Add finely-sliced cabbage and the ramen noodles to the broth and let them cook till the noodles are soft.

5. Pull apart the chicken into bite-sized pieces and then mix everything together (or add broth/noodles to a bowl and then add chicken and other vegetables).

Then enjoy...with some sriracha sauce added, if you like!

Butternut Squash & Parmesan Pasta

I made this a couple times for lunch last week (half a small squash is enough for two big servings) and it was gooood. Also quick and easy - some of the most important lunchtime considerations.

Butternut Squash & Parmesan Pasta Recipe


1. Peel and cut up the top part of a butternut squash (before you get down to the seedy, mushy part) and dice into small cubes. Put on a baking sheet and pour a few tablespoons of olive oil over it. Add a good sprinkle of spices - I used herbs de provence, but any Italianish spices or else some garlic and cayenne would be good. Roast at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes till tender but also getting a bit crispy.

2. While the squash is roasting, boil some penne pasta.

3. Drain the pasta and put it in a bowl with a drizzle of olive oil. Sprinkle generously with grated parmesan, stir it so the cheese melts a little, then add the roasted squash.


Enjoy!

A Crafty Saturday: Homemade Play Dough

My niece who lives in town came over for the morning and we made some glittery play dough. I didn't have any food coloring (or Kool-Aid) to make it pretty, but she didn't seem to mind. This is the recipe I followed for homemade glitter play dough, except I halved it and steeped a cherry-flavored tea bag in the water for a minute first so the dough would have a nicer scent. If you can't have it be colorful, at least it can smell good! Also, this recipe really is a great use of glitter because it doesn't come off the dough onto your hands. About the lowest-mess use possible for the stuff!

Uh-oh...a snake was attacking Baby

Easy Granola

I've been trying to eat well lately, which is surprisingly hard. But when I'm tired and working and just need to grab yet another quick snack, it's hard to quickly find something that's got enough protein, fiber, etc., etc. Granola is pretty much the perfect fix for that!

I found this quick oatmeal granola recipe and highly recommend it. Although I use closer to 3 T butter and a bit more honey (or molasses or maple syrup) to make sure it's well-coated. For the batch I made this morning, I used a mix of honey and maple syrup and it's especially good. I also add raisins and a little bit of chopped candied ginger, but any mix of dried fruit would be good.

Also, being in a hurry to make what's already called "quick granola," I just mix the ingredients together in a plastic gallon bag. Wasteful maybe, but SO much better than having to do extra dishes!

And what better way to serve it than over yogurt with fresh raspberries on top?

Cake in a Jar

Last night I got a craving to make a cake, and chose this olive oil & anise seed cake recipe from Martha Stewart. But it was made to be poured into four mini bundt pans and didn't look like enough dough for a full-size pan, so I looked through the cupboards for something to bake it in that was small...and came up with glass canning jars.

[Note: I found several Google results saying that it's unsafe to bake glass jars, but I didn't click on those results... Just an FYI. I think if they're quality jars and you don't bake on high heat, they should be okay.]

Anyway, I followed the recipe except for using grapefruit zest instead of orange zest, then poured the batter into three small canning jars. Don't overfill the jars -- halfway full of batter resulted in a full jar of cake. Bake for about 30-35 minutes, until the top is fairly firm but also a bit spongy.

You can also use leftover sweater sleeves as jar potholders...

One Tsp

When I was moving to Virginia, I set a limit for myself of bringing three cookbooks. (I actually cheated and also brought all the ones we'd been given as gifts, but it would have been a shame to leave those behind....)  To help me cope with leaving behind favorite cookbooks, Jason found One tsp, a site where you can save your favorite recipes. At the time I had to enter recipes manually, but they just added a really cool new feature that lets you "clip" recipes from sites like Epicurious and Allrecipes.com. Just click "clip" from your toolbar, and two seconds later the recipe has been formatted and saved to your One Tsp file.

I haven't compared it to other sites, but it's so easy (and it's free!) that I don't know why I'd even be interested in anything else. If you have lots of loose recipes you want to collect in one place electronically rather than in a binder or something, give it a try!

Pancit Recipe

Jason and I had pancit fairly often in Norfolk, since there was a Filipino restaurant close to our apartment. It's quite easy to make it yourself, though, even if it might not be as authentic.

Real pancit is supposed to have rice noodles, but I was all out so I just paired it with rice instead. To flavor it more, I added some crushed Thai chilies (part of my Christmas present from Jason - he knows exactly what I like!) and powdered coconut milk while I was cooking it in the rice cooker. So if you don't have rice noodles either, rice is a good substitute.

pancit uses simple ingredients

Pancit Recipe
adapted from Quick & Easy Pancit @ Allrecipes.com

- rice noodles (if using)
- 1/4 onion, roughly diced
- 1 cup cooked chicken meat, shredded (great for leftovers...)
- 1/4 head of cabbage, thinly sliced
- 3 medium carrots, cut into thin matchsticks
- spices: garlic powder & cayenne
- 3 tablespoons soy sauce

1. Start cooking rice (or cook noodles according to directions on package).
2. Heat some oil in a large skillet on medium heat. Saute onions and carrots till carrots start to get tender.
3. Add spices according to your taste, plus the chicken and soy sauce. Stir together till well-mixed.
4. Add the cabbage, more spices (if you want), and a few tablespoons of water. Stir well until cabbage is tender. You can also cover it with a lid or foil, turn the heat to low, and let it steam for a while.
5. Mix noodles with pancit mixture or pour it over rice. Enjoy!

This recipe made enough for Jason and me, and we were hungry, so just increase proportions as needed.

That's all there is to it! Healthy, fast, and tasty. The hardest part is cutting up the carrots into little pieces, but for some reason I enjoyed that.

Pizza

On Friday I made pizza entirely by myself for the first time. It's our usual Friday night dinner, but usually I make the dough and Jason rolls it out when he gets home from work and then we make it together. Fortunately, last time Jason taught me how to use the pizza peel (I broke it the first time I tried to use it...) so this time it was pizza-making success.

I like the mix of toppings we've been using lately: pepperoni (although I don't put on as much as Jason would like), kalamata olives, cherry tomato halves, crushed fennel seeds, sauteed red bell peppers, and of course mozzarella.

Turned out kinda crispy, but still delish.

Snow Day + Muffins

What it's been doing all day

What I've been eating all day

I found this recipe when searching for a recipe to use the apples that were getting wrinkly in the fridge: pumpkin apple muffins recipe. Of course, I couldn't manage to *quite* follow the recipe, but I'm sure it's great if you do!  I only made about 5/8 of a batch, so reduced the ingredients by 1/4-1/3, depending on which was easiest. I used some malt syrup plus extra brown sugar in place of the white sugar and I also added finely-chopped candied ginger that I got from the after-Christmas sale at Albertsons. Good stuff!

Cookies

I made these pumpkin cookies today, minus the frosting and with one addition: saffron. (Well, also another small addition of barley malt syrup instead of the last 1/4 cup of sugar. And I left out all the spices, since my pumpkin puree was already spiced. But the main twist is a pinch of saffron threads right into the dough while I was mixing it.)

I think saffron is addicting. Sorry, baby girl; I hope you don't come out beautifully orangish-tinted. But I'm already planning to make paella (since it uses saffron) very soon....

right before I ate two of them...

Ramen & Pho

This is really just a listing of recipes I want to try. I bought pig trotters at IGA because they are cheap (I didn't know they were called trotters when I bought them, but that just sounds like a nicer name for what it is. They were labeled pork hocks in the store.) And they are just right for making pork broth for Asian soups. I really wanted them for pho, but Jason is not so sure about pork pho, so I'm going to make ramen instead.

The trickiest part is finding a recipe that doesn't call for 5+ ingredients that i don't have!

This one for tonkotsu ramen broth sounds good. Tonkotsu means "pork bones," so probably any recipe for that type would work.

But here is a chicken pho recipe that I already have everything for! Well, sort of. I should buy a whole chicken for it, but that's easy. And some onions...

Chai Tea Recipe

Last Saturday Jason had to work all day, which sucked. But Rachel hung out over here all afternoon (attempting to do homework) and I tried out this awesome chai tea concentrate recipe. It was gone in two days, so of course this week I had to make more. Just not on the day I was cooking chili in the crockpot, because those would be conflicting smells. And chili is delicious, but I got tired of smelling it for eight hours!

Anyway. It's really simple -- you don't even need loose-leaf tea, although I'm sure that would be ideal. I just used eight plain black tea bags, some orange peel (being too lazy to zest it this time), two cinnamon sticks, anise seeds (use some other "pie spice" if you don't have these), 6-7 gently crushed cardamon pods, close to a teaspoon of peppercorns, about 1" of ginger root (peeled and cut into 4-5 slices), and 4-5 cloves. [The original recipe calls for a vanilla bean, too, but I didn't have any left. A little vanilla extract would be about as good.]

When I was done, I just put the chai concentrate in clean pickle jars and a swing-top bottle. All you have to do is heat it with equal parts milk and then add a little sugar or honey to sweeten it. Easy and delicious -- and it makes your kitchen smell wonderful. :)

Winter Fruit Salad

On Saturday I made fruit salad to go with our red-beans-and-rice-from-a-box-mix:

• two satsuma oranges, peeled, cut into small sections, and separated
• about 1/8 cup pomegranate seeds
• a handful of blackberries, sliced in half
• a teaspoon of brown sugar

I'm pretty partial to anything with oranges or blackberries in it, but the pomegranate seeds were nice, too (and as Jason pointed out, the reason I couldn't resist buying a pomegranate was because it was red).

Muffin-y Goodness + Recipe

I love muffins. They take just five minutes to mix up, but if I'm not careful I will eat five in one day...

I haven't been feeling well today, and yogurt and rice and that sort of thing were beginning to sound very blah. Then I thought of muffins. They are my cure for the (simplest) blues in life.

Here is my go-to muffin recipe, with the extras I threw in this time as a side note.

Muffins! Adapted from Better Homes & Gardens.

• 1-3/4 flour
• 1/3 c sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 egg
• 3/4 c milk
• 1/4 c oil

1. Mix dry ingredients together first, then add liquid. Bake at 400 for 15-20 minutes.  (Haha, I did not read that part this time, and baked them at 350. Still came out fine in 20 min.)

Variation: If you want to add some berries, use about 1/2 + 1/8 cup milk. I chopped up a handful of frozen cranberries and then added some frozen raspberries. This came to about 1/2-3/4 cup. Really, just add them to the dough till you think it looks good. I also added a splash of olive oil and some ginger for flavor.

Pancakes Recipe

We had pancakes on Sunday morning, which seemed to fit a lazy, sunny morning in the aftermath of the storm. Pancakes are something I do like mixes for, but last year I discovered a scratch recipe that made pancakes that actually turned out. Making them was always intimidating for me before that; somehow the consistency was never right, and half the batch turned out inedible, soggy, or too done. But I've never had a problem since I started using this recipe, although there might recipes out there with more flavor.

"Good Old-Fashioned Pancakes" Recipe:
adapted from Allrecipes.com

• 1-1/2 cups flour
• 3-1/2 tsp baking powder
• salt
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1-1/4 cups milk
• 1 egg
• 3 tbsp butter, melted
• [if desired: 1 tsp orange zest or some other flavoring]

Add dry ingredients to bowl, then stir in milk, egg, and melted butter. Add a little more milk if needed, then the zest. Cook on medium-high on the burner and LEAVE IT if it seems to be a good temp. Flip them as soon as there are bubbles through the whole pancake, then remove from heat when you can see the edges of the bottom side are brown.


Btw, onetsp.com is a great site for collecting your non-cookbook recipes together in one place that you can access from your computer or phone. Jason found it for me before we got married and I was deliberating which cookbooks to leave behind -- this way I could just enter any recipes I couldn't live without, but didn't need to bring the cookbook.

Homemade Applesauce

I have fond memories of my mom making (and canning) applesauce back in the days when doing a lot of canning and gardening and such was important to the budget. She made great applesauce; this is just a quick and easy version, but it smells great and tastes all right, too. And it's a good way to use up apples that have been sitting in your fridge for months...

Applesauce Recipe

1. Cut 5-6 apples into roughly 1" chunks. I used a mix of soft, sweet apples and firmer, yellow ones.

2. Put the apples in a large saucepan with about a cup of water (should fill the pan to about 1") and add the following: 4-5 tablespoons of sugar, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, half a cinnamon stick, and ginger (1 tsp powdered or a 2" piece of peeled, fresh ginger).

3. Cover with lid and cook on medium heat for about 10 minutes, till apples are soft.

4. Put in blender or food processor and puree till smooth.

Definitely add more sugar if you like sweet applesauce -- this is slightly tangy.

Pork & Potato Salad

Dinner last night was one of those throw-in-whatever-you-have meals, but it was really good. I loved this combination, but I think you could make it with any mix of meat and other toppings!

I admit it's a weird combination, but nothing was sounding good last night except some pulled pork, potatoes, and salad. I had mine all together as one salad, but Jason split his into the different ingredients.

The "recipe":

- First of all, I used pork from the freezer, from a pork roast I made the crock pot the other day. All I did to spice it up was make a little foil packet for it and put in on the grill, adding a sauce of white wine vinegar, worcestershire sauce, and spicy mustard.

- The potatoes were small yukon golds that I sliced into french fry-sized pieces and grilled with olive oil, pepper, and thyme.

- The "green" part was just lettuce and a topping of a fresh tomato and chives, with our usual olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

- We had toasted whole wheat bread on the side, too.

It still sounds a little odd, but it was incredibly good. Next time maybe I'll try it with thin-sliced steak.

Pumpkin Bread in July

I know it's the last day of July, but our apartment smelled an awful lot like Thanksgiving this afternoon. The other day Jason was cleaning out the freezer and discovered some pumpkin leftover from last year, and then yesterday after the brewing he boiled down leftover wort (basically sweet, dark-colored malt water with sugars and flavor extracted from barley) and turned it into syrup. A really thick syrup, kind of like molasses.

malt syrup

And with pumpkin and this new ingredient in the house, I had to try it out. So I took my favorite pumpkin bread recipe and modified it (see my recipe at end).

It's sadly addicting, but I've only had two pieces so far.

So I know most people don't have this stuff on hand, but I think using molasses or molasses and honey (or even just honey?) would be really good, too.

Malty Pumpkin Bread

• 1 cup pumpkin puree
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup oil
• 1/2 cup barley malt extract
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1-1/3 cups flour
• 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
• salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp ginger
• If no spice in pumpkin puree, add cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, etc.

Mix liquid ingredients together, then add dry ingredients and stir everything in. Bake in a greased and floured bread pan on 350 for 45-50 minutes. (If you like things sweeter, up the syrup to 3/4 cups or use 1 cup of sugar.)

Popsicles!

Jason is a fan of the red, orange, and purple twin-pops, but I kinda prefer homemade ones. Last month I bought a set of Tovolo Star Ice Pop Molds and they've been a great investment! (The size/shape of the base isn't very convenient for fitting into the freezer, though. But the popsicles themselves are a perfect size.)

So far I've mostly done blends with watermelon since one watermelon makes a lot of watermelon lemonade and popsicles. The last ones were watermelon blended with some fresh-squeezed orange juice, water, a tablespoon of powdered sugar, and a shot of tequila. :)  Also I made fudgesicles with leftover chocolate pudding. Now I'm ready to branch out into other flavors. Mango, for one, but any other ideas?