I came up with this recipe to accompany my Beet and Eggplant Tacos the other night. It’s easy, flavorful, and colorful!
Chai Ice Cream Cake
This is my first collaboration, ha! My friend at work is a scientist by day and owns a local chai company, Boston Chai Party, by night (they ship!). He and his business partner are Indian, so you can be sure his product is authentic. While he has the chai tea recipe on lock, we were talking one day about other ways that the chai spice could be used and the first one we thought of was chai ice cream. Naturally, I had to turn it into an ice cream cake. I have to say, this might be the most beautiful dish I’ve ever made!
Beet and Eggplant Tacos
I really really really love tacos. If I opened a restaurant, it would probably be a taco restaurant. They are relatively easy to make, they are a punch of flavor, they please vegans, vegetarians, and meat-eaters, and they offer endless possibilities. So many taco recipes out there are meat tacos, but I hope to ADAPT my favorite taco toppings while exploring the vegetable universe for great fillings. (NOTE: Interested in that bean salad in the picture? Here it is!)
Stoddard’s Ciao Senza Nome
As I try to develop my ability to create my own recipes, I think being able to recreate dishes that I’ve eaten at restaurants is a great step to understanding flavor BALANCE and RATIOS, and to hone my sense of taste. Cocktails are the beginners version of this strategy, because the restaurant usually lists all the ingredients on the menu so I just have to figure out the measurements. I had this particular cocktail (the name of which means “hello nameless” in Italian) at Stoddard’s in Downtown Boston, where a very nice waitress recommended it because I don’t like very sweet drinks. I chose it because I already had all the ingredients so it would be very easy to recreate.
Cranberry Nut Granola Bars
This is a bit of an unusual post for me, because this is far from the first time I’ve made these granola bars. In fact, I eat at least one every day, so trust me when I say I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about them…
The reason I eat so many granola bars is that I have a serious hangry problem. My day can be going along fine, then suddenly my blood sugar drops and within 30 minutes I’m irritable and nauseated. As a result, I carry snacks everywhere, and these are my reliable favorites. I prefer them over store-bought granola bars because commercial bars are so expensive, and they often contain chocolate or some mysterious sticky binding agent, neither of which I enjoy. When I make my own granola bars, I can use big pieces of fruit and nuts, and I get exactly what I want. This particular recipe is so easy: just one bowl, one 13×9 pan, and they make enough for a few weeks. Making your own granola bars is something I recommend to everyone. Once you go homemade, you won’t go back.
On vacation this weekend, but I got a new book!
I’m on vacation this weekend so I’ll be skipping my recipe post today, but don’t worry, I’ll be back at it on Wednesday. In the meantime, I got a new book that I’m super excited about! Instead of recipes, this book is all about the flavor profiles of different ingredients and learning what combinations BALANCE best. So far it’s great, and exactly what I need! Look out for many references to it in the future.
Spanish Chopped Salad
A couple of years ago I traveled to Barcelona and Madrid with my two best friends. As a major foodie, I planned all of our meals (let’s be real, I planned all of our everything… me? controlling?). But one of our best experiences was a random little cafe that we happened upon for lunch one day. They weren’t even serving lunch yet (it was only noon, after all) and the owner didn’t speak much English, but he ended up bringing us dish after dish of classic, no-frills Spanish cooking – pan con tomate, sliced cheeses, and tortilla. At the time, I knew that there was this thing called tortilla that bore no resemblance to the Mexican taco and burrito casings, but this was my first experience tasting it, and I was an immediate convert. It’s just potato, onion, egg, and cheese served room temperature – basically a frittata – but the flavors balance perfectly and it tastes like you could be sitting in any Spanish home kitchen, i.e. exactly as comforting as you’d hope. After deciding to recreate this experience using Food52 founder Amanda Hesser’s Spanish Tortilla recipe, I figured adding a bit of nutrients with a Spanish-inspired side salad would be a great opportunity to practice the lessons I learned in my Basic Vinaigrette post.
And yes, I topped that Spanish tortilla with a totally non-Spanish Sriracha mayo. #scandalous #sorrynotsorry
Buffalo Cauliflower Pasta
Let’s face it, I always have a craving for buffalo wings. They’re spicy, they’re fatty, they make my face hurt, they are a huge mess to eat. And they’re so inextricably tied to atmosphere – game day, out with friends and family, having a boisterous fun time. On top of that, I lived the first 10 years of my life in Buffalo, NY, so one might say they’re my native food. The only thing not to like is that they’re so bad for you – fried meat and no vegetables (the celery doesn’t count)! I have a hard time justifying eating them when it’s not a special occasion. To satisfy these competing desires, I developed this pasta recipe to try to get the feel of buffalo wings on a weeknight. Does it look like buffalo wings? Definitely not. Does it taste like buffalo wings? Let’s find out…
Coooookies? (Spiced)
When I get stressed, or bored, or hungry… I bake. For me, it’s the process of cooking (not the final product) that I love the most. The chopping, stirring, and measuring relax me, and it requires so much focus that I just zone out and forget about my worries. Now that I’m learning to create my own recipes, these spontaneous cooking sessions are a perfect opportunity to take a risk – if it doesn’t work out, I still accomplished my goal of relaxation, and no one was counting on the product anyway!
Basic Vinaigrette
Sometimes, you just need a salad dressing. I hate buying salad dressing because it’s expensive (for what it is), it comes with way too much dressing for my needs, and it’s usually full of sugar or other weird ingredients. I’ve known for a while that making vinaigrette was really simple. I usually just wing it and it often comes out a bit too sour, so in the spirit of this blog, I decided to do a bit of research on the RATIOS, and came up with a base recipe that can be adapted in a variety of ways to make exactly the dressing you want.
Results Not Guaranteed 