Honey Chocolate Peanut-butter Banana

Another Alex creation. This is a common late night snack for him, long after I've gone to bed. He graciously recreated this midnight ritual during the harsh light of day and he even aloud me to document the entire process. So here it is for your enjoyment and inspiration - Alex's late night goop of marvelous deliciousness!

Forage the wild kitchen for the elusive banana!

Prepare a bowl with several scoops of peanut butter.

...and get some chocolate chips and honey nearby.

Peel the banana while butter melts on the stove, then slice the banana into the butter and fry it.

Gently flip these delicate morsels with a spoon and continue to fry just until they begin to have the slightest amount of color on them.

Transfer the fried banana to the peanut butter bowl and immediately add chocolate chips and honey.

Notice how the chocolate chips melt into the hot fried banana. Mmmmmmm.

The next part is critical, and Alex assured me that any photo would surely be disgusting.

Once the chocolate chips are melted, mix everything together with a spoon, and enjoy.

I think it's actually rather beautiful. A complex landscape of peanut, chocolate, honey, and banana!

Honey Mustard Pork

For the record, here is Alex's honey mustard pork recipe. I believe this recipe is still evolving, but we wont know unless we have a record of it now, to compare to it later. Perhaps one day we will mine the data in this blog to construct a phylogenetic tree that explains the evolution of our recipes and eating habits. But in the mean time - pork!

We had a lonely pork chop in the freezer that Alex used for this, though he would have preferred a Boston Butt, or a similar cut of pork better used for slow cooking.

Brine the pork for 1 hour prior to cooking, though Alex is curious to explore alternatives/longer brining procedures.

Brine

2 Tbsp Salt

2 Tbsp Sugar

1/4 cup Apple Cider Vinegar

Water

Mix together the ingredients for the brine, plus enough water to cover the pork in a baking dish. Let sit in the fridge for an hour.

Take the pork out of the brine and sear it in hot bacon grease in a cast iron skillet. It should be thoroughly seared, a little charred even.

Dump the brine out of the baking dish, place the seared pork back in the dish.
Deglaze the cast iron skillet and caramelize some sliced onions and garlic in the skillet.
Top the pork with the onion/garlic/pan-juices.

In a small bowl or 2-cup measuring cup, prepare the sauce:

Sauce

2 Tbsp Honey

1/4-1/2 cup Coffee, fresh brewed

1/4-1/2 cup Apple Cider Vinegar

1 Tbsp Molasses

at least 1Tbsp+ of Mustard Powder... probably more

a healthy dash of Saigon Cinnamon

sizable pinch of Applewood Smoked Sea Salt

some Crushed Red Pepper Flakes

a healthy amount of Cumin, maybe 1-2 tsp

~1/2 cup Boiling Water

Vigorously stir together all the ingredients for the sauce, then pour it over the onions, garlic, and pork in the baking dish. Cover the dish with foil and bake at 250F for 2 hours.

Remove the pork from the sauce, blend the sauce, then reduce it on the stove until it has a good BBQ sauce like consistency. Alex also made cornbread and I whipped up a coleslaw to make a meal out of it.

The Joy of Cooking has a great cornbread recipe. I make coleslaw a little different every time. My goal is to make it as colorful as possible, here's the gist of it:

Coleslaw

Red Cabbage - very thinly sliced

Carrots - grated

Peppers of every possible color! - grated or thinly sliced

Cilantro - coarsely chopped

Green Onion - sliced

Red Onion - minced (maybe a Tbsp-ish)

Dolup of Mayonnaise

Big splash of Apple Cider Vinegar

Dash Cinnamon

Big dash Paprika

Huge pinch of Salt

...

Additional suggestions for coleslaw:

Kale - thinly sliced/chopped

Beets of any/all colors - grated

Lemon and/or Orange Zest

Apple - diced
Mustard

Herbs! - play with herbs!

Play with Spices too! (Fennel an Cumin come to mind first..)

Black Bean Cactus Thing

Several years ago we bought some dried black beans because it makes a lot of sense buy beans dried rather than canned (less processing and all around cheaper). However, dried beans take planning to cook and canned beans are just so darn easy. Anyway, we FINALLY soaked and cooked those black beans we bought years ago. I suppose an added bonus of dried beans is they're incredibly shelf stable.

The beans soaked for 24 hours and then we used them to make a hearty vegetarian dinner of brown rice, black beans, nopales, onions, carrots, garlic, sweet peppers, tomatoes, and cilantro.

First things first, the spines must be cleaned off the nopales.

While I meticulously de-armed the nopales, the pre-soaked black beans and brown rice cooked on the stove. When they were done, I decided to save the cooking water, to used it to flavor something else.

I diced the nopales and sauteed it with onions and garlic. 

Alex added spices (cumin, California paprika, cinnamon, red flake pepper, black pepper)...

..and sweet peppers...

We finished it with tomatoes and cilantro before adding the cooked beans and rice. Some Avocado and green onion would have also been awesome additions.

Lettuce Cups

The first time I ever had lettuce cups was in high school when my buddies came to my cafe job as I was closing up the shop. They had arm-fulls of take-out from Garden Fresh and insisted that I stop everything and try the lettuce cups. They were amazing. A medley of deliciousness, delivered to the mouth via lettuce in hand. They transported me to another dimension where everything was lettuce cups, and everything was awesome. Somehow, those lettuce cups were so distracting that I walked away from the cafe that night with lights on and doors unlocked - I was shocked my boss didn't fire me for a careless teenage stunt like that, but thankfully, he didn't.

For some reason, I never really considered making lettuce cups myself. They were some sort of untouchable magic that only Garden Fresh was capable of. Then Alex decided to take the initiative to make lettuce cups a reality.

Lettuce Cups

Bibb Lettuce

......

Ground Beef

Garlic

Onion

Carrot

Sweet Peppers

Olive Oil

......

Chopped Fennel Greens

Dry Ground Fennel

Coriander

Berbere

Tumeric

Black Pepper

Red Pepper Flakes

Salt

Cut everything into a small dice. Saute the beef and veggies in olive oil until cooked and season with the fennel greens and spices.

Serve inside of bibb lettuce leaves and eat them with your hands (like a taco)!

Meatballs & Yogurt Sauce

My camera has sadly passed on to silicon heaven. Luckily, my iPhone has a surprisingly decent camera, so here's a post made entirely of iPhone photos!

It's been heating up here in the Bay Area, and the other evening Alex and I crafted a quick and (mostly) cool dinner. Alex made a yogurt sauce...

Strauss Plain Yogurt with hella chopped garlic!

The spice line-up for the yogurt:

Coriander, Red Pepper, Tumeric, Cinnamon, Cumin...

Garlic, Yogurt, Spices, Olive Oil...

Chopped tomatoes and cucumber to finish the yogurt sauce

...In the end, perhaps the yogurt sauce was more like a saucy tomato-cucumber salad. Anyway, moving on to the meatballs:

Ground beef, chopped garlic, corn meal, cilantro, cumin, paprika, salt.

My favorite part is mushing all the meatball ingredients together with my hands! Also, we were all out of both flour and eggs, so I improvised with cornmeal and completely left out the egg. Turns out eggs are totally unnecessary for meatballs.

Searing the meatballs in olive oil

Meatballs with Cucumber-Tomato-Yogurt Sauce, garnished with Green Onion.

Life, Food, Foodia

Something shocking happened a few weeks ago. I was making waffles, and went to post a photo to Foodia with a link to my waffle recipe on this blog. After several minutes of searching my blog, it became clear that there was no waffle recipe post. I was hit by the painful realization that perhaps I had neglected my beloved blog while indulging in a digital foodie mistress, Foodia. 

And so my excuses begin for why I haven't updated this blog in so long. Here's what I've been up to in the past several weeks, with emphasis on the food, of course:

Alex and I traveled to Eureka, CA for a long weekend to attend the wedding shenanigans of my non-biological brother (Colin) and his best friend (Danielle). Alex discovered (or rediscovered?) a love of Tapatio. The bacon-wrapped grilled asparagus was particularly memorable from the wedding reception. Also the uncle of the groom was a professional brewer and helped the groom brew all the beer for the wedding! It was a delicious pale ale that paired fabulously with the oh-so-succulent carrot cake.

The morning after the wedding, everyone gathered again at the Samoa Cookhouse for brunch. This place is an experience to say the least. It used to be the dining hall for a logging camp, the only thing that seems to have changed is that the logging camp no longer exists and now they feed they public. It's shared seating at long tables and a server will approach you shortly after arriving to say something like, "today we have pancakes, biscuits and gravy, sausage, eggs, bacon, and toast. Yes or no?" You can only say yes, and before you know it, there's 7 plates of food in front of you. Amazing. Also, their gravy is one of the best gravies I've ever had.

The weekend after Colin & Danielle's wedding was Alex's & my first wedding anniversary! We prepared our garden for planting fall veggies, took a picnic into San Francisco for a free concert in the park, and ate our way around Berkeley and Oakland. 

Then in the past week or so I discovered my camera broke (sad!), our good friends from Arizona came to visit us en route to Seattle (yay!), and I feel like I've been getting swamped with stuff at work.

So I've been failing at updating my blog lately, but I've been thriving on Foodia. And now, let me shamelessly tell you how awesome Foodia is. Foodia is a smartphone app that let's you easily document all your food experiences (eating, drinking, making , shopping). It's basically a quick and dirty version of my blog, and I'm addicted. I thought I was obsessed with blogging, but now, thanks to Foodia, I can document and archive ALL my food experiences! 

Here's a montage of what I've been up to on Foodia...

Everyone (with a smartphone) should download Foodia and join me on this ridiculous foodiadventure! Oh yeah, and I'll get around to writing an official Waffle Recipe Blog Post some time in the very near future.

Pork Chops with Strawberry Salsa and Yam Fries

Alex and I have been on a roll coming up with excuses to use fruit in a savory way. Yesterday we got some pork chops form Prather Ranch at the Grand Lake Farmers Market, and this is what we ended up making...

All good things begin with sauteed onions and garlic!

Onions and garlic we removed from the pan to make way for the chops! We seared these until they were well browned or even slightly blackened in a few places.

We made a sauce in the bottom of a baking dish with a big drizzle of molasses (maybe a Tbsp?) and about a 1/4cup or so of apple cider vinegar. This is where the sauteed onions and garlic went to make room for the pork chops in the pan. Then when the pork chops were thoroughly seared, they too were moved to the baking dish.

Then the pan where the onions, garlic, and pork had been was deglazed with some water, once the pan was deglazed, the liquid was also poured into the baking dish. Chopped carrots and half a diced apple were also added to the baking dish...

Then it was wrapped in foil in put in a 350F oven with the yam fries.

To make the sweet potato fries, we simply sliced some yams, tossed them with Portuguese olive oil, salt, and spread them out on a baking sheet.

Before:

When baking fries, they need to be stirred/flipped to ensure even cooking.

After: 

While everything was in the oven, I made a strawberry salsa:

1/2 pint of strawberries, diced

1/2 bunch of cilantro, chopped

1/2 bunch of green onions, thinly sliced.

1/4 Fugi apple, diced

juice from half of a tiny lemon (maybe a tsp of juice)

pinch salt

This turned out to be kind of a ridiculous amount of food, but it was soooo delicious!

Orange-Fennel Beef & Rice

Today's post is brought to you by the color orange!

...Also the fruit, orange. I started out with with vague idea of orange & beef and rice-based one-pot meals like jambalaya or paella. I was also excited to use these super flavorful, extremely colorful carrots we got at the farmers market!

On the stove, I began by browning some ground beef.

Then I added onions, carrots, and garlic. Sauteed these all together until they were beginning to brown. I quickly added a cup of rice, stirred it in, and de-glazed the pan with two cups of water. Then I added both juice and zest from one orange... 

And some freshly grated nutmeg.

I let this all simmer until the rice was tender and the liquid was nearly gone (As it cooked I keept an eye on it to make sure it always had plenty of liquid, adding water as needed). When the rice was tender, the flavor still wasn't quite right. So I grabbed Alex to get his opinion. He had the brilliant idea of dried fennel, maybe a teaspoon or so. Then we added a dash of cumin, salt, and cilantro and ended up with a fruity delicious beefy rice dish!