conuly

This one was technically only saved since a few weeks ago, I was planning to make it for Christmas, but it's close enough.

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Today I made poached eggs in tomato sauce, which upon Googling seems to be a universal dish, with lots of cultures having their own variations on it.

I made mine in marinara sauce, and it was a. yummy b. filling c. nutritious and d. cheap. The garlic bread cost as much per person as the meal!

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I can think of just a zillion and a half ways to do this. The only thing I did wrong is I overcooked the eggs. I've never successfully poached eggs before (I used to never really understand how to do it at all!) and was so buoyed with my success that it didn't occur to me to keep a closer eye on them. Also, they seemed to have clear whites for the longest time, so I didn't realize how fast the yolks would harden once the whites did!

But I remembered I'd read about making brownies with black beans, so I put a cup and a half aside. And with one thing and another, those brownies didn't get made. (One thing was that all the recipes online called for canned beans and box mix. No thank you!)

Today I committed myself to making those brownies... but the beans had gone bad. I could easily have made NORMAL brownies, but once I decide to do a thing I like to follow through as I intended. So I just boiled some more beans.

You know, when you make black beans the water ends up, well, black? They're the beans from the black lagoon!!!!

Anyway, several hours later I finally made this recipe, taking the advice from the comments and adding half a cup of flour. I also stuck some peanut butter on top, and didn't add the mint extract. (Sorry, Lizziey! But then, we're not sharing with you anyway :P)

Now, the idiotic comments that "Oh, I'm so okay with my kids gorging on THESE brownies because they get protein and fiber!" are, as I said, completely absurd. A quick check on the data shows that you're hardly getting any of that in a reasonable serving. And if it's NOT a reasonable serving it's still too many brownies for every day.

So I'm not going to cook these just to make dessert a little healthier. It's dessert. It's not really supposed to be healthy... and if I want a healthy dessert, I'll just give the nieces a mango or some bananas or something.

But I would absolutely cook them again for the texture. Very firm, and the brownies held their shape even though I cut them, as is traditional, when they were barely out of the oven. I know I shouldn't, but I do anyway.

They tasted pretty much like normal as well, and of course you don't have to use any flour at all. So all in all, I have to say this experiment was a wild success.

And the nieces weren't able to guess the secret ingredient at all! I had to tell them!

I actually found a great recipe (as always, I increased the chili powder, and I also added smoked paprika. Mmm. No olives, though) last week that I intend to make again before the end of summer, and freeze it for winter, but it calls for mozzarella and buffalo milk mozzarella is SO expensive (delicious, though). Well, actually, I'd probably make the recipe and freeze it WITHOUT the cheese and then add the cheese after. I'm want to start freezing meals to save on cooking, anyway, now that I have space in the freezer. But the point is I can't make it until I have some money for the raw ingredients. Excepting the zucchini.

So, how ELSE can you make zucchini? I might try a meat loaf today, which I've a. never made and b. to my knowledge never eaten but which c. seems like no more than meatballs or hamburger (do you know, Evangeline won't eat burgers if she has a choice? Even if she doesn't, she doesn't like them!) in loaf form, and all because it looks like a good way to get rid of some of the squash. (I might actually resort to hiding it. Ana won't eat it, nor Evangeline.) And over the weekend I might make zucchini waffles with cheddar, but that's out as a family dinner for the obvious reason.

Gimme recipes!

Anyway, I have a question about all these spice blends I'm making. They all call for a teaspoon of this, a tablespoon of that.

When I was a kid, I was taught that teaspoon was t and tablespoon was T. But now all the cookbooks seem to abbreviate them as ts and Tbs. When did that happen?

I got this recipe from a rather tattered copy of The Vegetarian Epicure, which is a very dairy-heavy book. All the vegetarian sources I've read recently say that vegetarians get a lot of protein from "beans and pulses", but this book gets a lot of protein from cow milk. Well, I'm not vegetarian, so what do I care?

This is delicious yogurt.

1 tsp butter or butter substitute
1.5 tsp cumin seeds
.25 tsp cardamom seeds
.25 tsp ground coriander
.25 tsp ground cayenne
2 cups mashed bananas
2 cups yogurt

Pound the spices lightly in a mortar so they're not fully crushed, stir them in the melted butter on a hot stove, cook for a few minutes, add the bananas, then pour the whole thing out into the yogurt. Stir, then let it sit.

That's the original recipe, though I reworded slightly. I modify this somewhat.

First, because I eat this as a dessert instead of an accompaniment, and because I use sheep's yogurt (which tends to be tarter than cow milk yogurt, though that may be just the companies I'm purchasing from), I end up sweetening this with a little honey. Taste before you sweeten.

Secondly, I add more spices - doubling most of that up there. Taste before you add spices. You may even decide to change what spices you use. I once used garam masala, and if I didn't use onions in my berbere I imagine it'd taste quite good with those spices as well. Mmm. Actually, I must try that...!

Third, crushed lightly cumin? DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO CRUSH CUMIN WITH A MORTAR? Most cumin (and, for that matter, most cardamom) in my version of this recipe has been firmly pulverized in a coffee spice grinder. I add a little "lightly crushed" for appearance

Fourth, instead of ground cayenne I usually just toast a whole pepper with the spices, but remove it before adding the banana. I'm less likely to go overboard that way. Alternatively, I substitute fresh ground black pepper - not the same, but just as good when you have people who aren't fond of spiciness.

Finally, I usually top this with wheat germ. Gotta use that stuff up. It's like all that oatmeal we have sitting up on the pantry shelves. Sure, we *could* eat something else for breakfast, but meanwhile those 50 pounds of oats aren't gonna eat themselves!

I'm doing this from memory, I forgot my list of stuff :(

We got 4 eggplant, 6 green bell peppers, 5+ pounds of squash, half a pound of salad greens, another four or so pounds of cucumbers, a dozen eggs, a box of peaches, a box of apricots, a box of blueberries. Edit: And carrots! What seemed like a lot of carrots.

So not too much this week! Next week, maybe we'll get more. I hope so - 'dul ended up using all my green beans, I was very disappointed, though I repurposed some of them after the fact.

Gonna make squash bread or cake later. Not sure which.

'dul made ratatouille today, but without eggplant. It was really good. At first I attributed it to the lack of eggplant, but then I realized what *else* was noticeable by its very absence - parsley! (And when that man cooks parsley, he goes way overboard.) I didn't even notice it was gone, but that clearly was what really made all the difference.

Oh, and an okra recipe for jedirita (eggplant recipe is simply going to have to wait, I'm working on finding mine. I do sometimes panfry eggplant in a limited amount of oil (it will sop that up like nobody's business) with pepper and cumin, that's always yummy. And once I made a raw eggplant salad which, being raw, bypassed all the weird texture issues one normally gets with eggplant, but hell if I can remember what-all else was in it besides raw eggplant! Black beans, I think, and salt and pepper, and maybe corn.

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I've done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But...
It keeps them on my knife!

I always thought this poem was strange as a kid - not because he eats his peas with a knife, but because if he's "done it all his life" surely he thinks that they taste normal that way?

Anyway, I have a poll:

[Poll #1211797]

See, I've had this recipe for watermelon salad with feta and mint floating in my mind for a while (and we always have plenty of mint), so I picked up some feta at the store today. But then, when I was googling to figure out how *much* feta goes in that salad with a whole or half a watermelon, I saw THIS recipe, and this one as well.

I grew up just grabbing a slice of (cold, refrigerated) watermelon and eating it on the fire escape in my room (did the same with gumbo. Everybody else ate in the kitchen, but for those meals I seem to remember eating them looking out over the backyard a lot, which normally I didn't do) and then coming back for more and more and more.

And in the comments to one of those recipes somebody posted that they normally eat watermelon with salt (SO not how I ever did it) like it's a normal thing, and I remember reading that in some areas, that *is* how one usually does it.

So - yeah, poll.

This time, with detailed steps!

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I don't know what I was thinking, seriously.

My mother's birthday is coming up, and I had the best idea - I could make her a Belgian dinner, because, y'know, we're Belgian.

Only thing? I've never done that before. My knowledge of Belgian cuisine is mostly limited to frites and galettes, and I don't know how to make either one of them anyway! Most of what I cook, and my sister, and my brother-in-law, is from... well... non-European nations. And if it's from Europe, it's more or less Italian.

And what I'm finding online all identifies itself as Flemish, which... even if they make the same dishes in Wavre, they must all have names in French I can give to my mother!

So I'd like some advice, in the form of recipes or websites where I can find recipes, preferably websites not found with three word google searches - I've looked there. I'll be able to make *something*, but I want to make something *perfect*.

Cookies that included white sugar, brown sugar, white chocolate chips, pecans, maple syrup, and garlic. Which had soaked in the maple syrup for half an hour.

I swear, I asked Johanna three times if she was sure that wasn't just a typo for, say, "hunk of chocolate" or something.

Granted, it was very specifically elephant garlic, which is much milder than the regular sort... but it was still very clearly garlic.

Now, I like garlic. A lot. In just about everything - but this was a new one to me! I thought the effect was very carefully interesting. Ana, however, loved it and insisted on eating the entire cookie herself. No sharing.

You can't make this stuff up. (Note - they only used four cloves of garlic, because elephant garlic is, as the name implies, huge. I've seen whole heads of lettuce smaller than that garlic!)