If you happen to be one of the 8 people who have looked at my recipe blog recently, you might have noticed that I just added a ton of stuff. We haven’t been eating that much, I promise. While I hadn’t really gotten behind on posting new recipes to What’s for Dinner, I did have a large stack of recipes that I had yet to make and then post to the blog. You see, I had a large stack of Cooking Light and a few other magazines with some recipes in them I wanted to try. Then I decided I needed to clean out the magazines (I can’t remember if this was before or after I watched my first episode of Hoarders ever and then had to organize everything I own that night and the next day), so I tore out the recipes I wanted to try. A stack of paper is less clutter than a stack of magazines, right? Then, they sat in a stack on our kitchen island for a few weeks. Finally, this past weekend while it was raining, again, I sat down and entered all of these new recipes into the blog, even though we hadn’t tried them yet. While I had used the blog to enter recipes we tried, I created it just to organize and store our recipes, and spent a lot of time thinking about how I could search by tags and categories. So for instance, I can type in dijon mustard or black beans and it pulls up several recipes with that as a main ingredient, or I could scan by categories like soup or dessert. Clever I know.
Getting the recipe blog updated was a labor intensive process, but was helped mightily by GT football winning their game in the background. It was also helped by the fact that since most of the recipes I had to enter were from Cooking Light, all of their recipes are online (mostly at myrecipes.com so you can search for the dish name and cooking light and pull it up), so I had to do the post naming, categorizing and tagging, but I could copy and paste the recipe into the blog and then just clean it up a little. I probably spent 2-3 hours entering all of the recipes though. You’re welcome.
So far we can’t guarantee that all of these recipes are good, but looking through all of those recipes in order to post them made me eager to try some new things this week so I can already give a few comments.
Sunday morning I made these pumpkin ginger waffles as a surprise for PL. While she was getting ready for bed Saturday night I was sneaky and went back to the front of the house and pulled our pureed pumpkin out of the freezer so it would be ready for waffle batter Sunday morning. I thought I had ground ginger, but didn’t so I added pumpkin pie spice instead. We still remember some gingerbread pancakes we had a few years ago, so this recipe was appealing since it seemed to pick up some of those flavors that were so good. The waffles were awesome! I bought some ginger later that day at the Farmer’s market so these will be even better next time.
Yesterday after a really hectic day at work, I came home and made Dijon Mustard Chicken Fricassee and Lemon Chive Roasted Vegetables (I used purple fingerling potatoes, red new potatoes, carrots, parsnip and onion). I had to spend 5-10 minutes in the morning getting the chicken marinating in the mustard-herb sauce, but it was worth the time. This dinner was incredibly good, and not terribly hard for how fancy looking it was. The carrots were especially good with the lemon and chives–who knew? PL washed all of the dishes and even swept the kitchen, so it must have been good.
Recipes and Notes September 29, 2009
Why I’m Always Tired on Mondays April 27, 2009
PL is in the middle of finals, so I’ve been trying to be as helpful as possible around the house so she can just study. It’s a nice feeling to be so useful, and I actually enjoy thinking of especially nice things to do to make PL’s life easier and happier (like buying PL and her classmate chocolate peanut butter cheesecake brownies from the Farmer’s Market or getting a pot of coffee ready to brew whenever she wants to turn it on). 1, 2, 3…Awwww.
Her law school study partner has been at the house almost all day everyday since last Monday except for sleeping–which they aren’t doing a ton of anyway. I realized that when someone is around for an extended period of time your normal routines become public–cooking, cleaning, exercising, eating ice cream at 11pm. Our closest friends have been around while we’re doing laundry or dishes, but even with them we usually just hang out with them and save other chores and cleaning for another time. Since PL and her friend were studying, I continued on with my usual activities, but felt a little self-conscious at times about putting our household operations on display. For example, I wanted to organize the pantry, but felt like that would make me look way too OCD and industrious. (fyi: I did eventually organize the pantry, but did it while our guest was gone.)
So, here’s what I did while they studied, and studied some more, followed by more studying.
Saturday:
I started by weeding flower beds in the yard and then sprayed lots of Roundup on more even more weeds since pulling them up wasn’t going very fast. I made a little more progress in our front yard garden bed, but it was really hot by noon so I went inside and took a shower. I organized the pantry-it did actually need it by the way-and went to Lowes (along with half of the population of Atlanta) to buy some plants.
With the plants unloaded from the car, but with the sun being too hot, I stayed inside and watched Superbad on DVD…I just love Michael Cera. The whole time I had laundry going too, lest you think I just sat around and did nothing for 2 hours.
As it was getting dark and cooler I planted Gerber daisies and Mexican heather by the mail box and spread some grass seed on our giant dirt patches in the backyard…probably an exercise in futility but one can dream of having grass one day. (I’ll post pictures soon…after I find the camera and remember to take them, and upload them)
Then I cooked a yummy dinner of apricot glazed chicken (I checked our recipe blog and I never posted that, so I’ll get on that soon too), sauteed yellow squash, and green beans for my law student. It’s not too hard of a recipe and really delicious, but it does involve the food processor.
Sunday:
I went to Sunday school and church and stopped at Chipotle for lunch. I enjoyed sitting under an umbrella on their deck by myself watching the cars and street traffic, but I didn’t stay too long since I had other errands to run. After lunch I went to the Farmer’s market–and got all our weekly groceries there. That’s right, all of them, which I don’t normally do but I’m reading yet another Michael Pollan book and felt like we needed organic milk this week.
When I got home I prepared 60 pounds of chicken leg quarters for the dogs to eat-I used every container we have for the dogs’ food plus a couple more that I found and they are now set for their meals for 20 days. I only cut myself once, and just in case you were wondering, it takes me 2 hours to get that much chicken ready. In case you are also wondering what in the world I’m talking about (I did say my normal private routines became public) our dogs eat a raw diet…and it makes them very healthy and happy. Luckily PL’s study partner already knew that our dogs ate this, so she was intrigued but not grossed out by the fact that we had 60 pounds of raw chicken in our kitchen. Damn dogs.
After filling our freezer with containers of chicken, I went back outside and planted pansies in the flower bed by the front door, planted our side yard flower bed (moss rose, more pansies, and some other flower that I thought was pretty but can’t remember its name). Daylight was still my friend so I planted herbs in the backyard herb garden-basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, flat leaf parsley, mint, bee balm (no clue what this is good for but it makes pretty flowers), and sage. I had enough daylight and energy to put mulch around the newly planted things and hang up the bumblebee windsock that I bought.
After a shower since I was covered in dirt and mulch, I cooked organic tofu stir fry with garlic, carrots, broccoli, snow peas and green and orange peppers (peppers cooked in a separate pan since I can’t/don’t eat them) and brown rice for my law student plus her study pal. I am totally a keeper.
Then I did another peculiar chore that is not usually put on display–I made vegetable bags for me and PL. So, vegetable bags? This is a long story, but we learned a long time ago that we actually will eat more vegetables if we cut up fresh vegetables and put them in bags for at least a few days during the week. When we pack our lunches we can just throw a bag in our lunch box usually along with some fat-free ranch dip.
Time Wasting Website Review: This is Why You’re Fat April 22, 2009
Oh Americans…we can’t find a food that can’t be made a little better by adding cheese, bacon, or deep frying it. I present This is Why You’re Fat. It’s a fascinating blog of some truly amazing foods. I’m happy to say for the future of my cardiac health that most of the foods look disgusting to me. Additionally, since I don’t smoke pot, things like the snack food pizza (pizza topped with doritos and corn dogs) aren’t anything I crave on a regular basis.
I do have to confess that I think this might be the best omlet ever (chicken fried steak and gravy omlet with cheese and onions):
However, I’m afraid that meatloaf with a delicious macaroni and cheese center might sound gross, but it’s slightly intriguing. And a deep fried grilled cheese just looks amazing.
30 to 30 March 30, 2009
I was counting weeks on the calendar recently for some vacation and work things (6 weeks until we take our just booked vacation!), and realized I will turn 30 in 30 weeks. So far I feel ok about turning 30, but ask me again as it gets closer. I will be 30 with a 26 year old girlfriend, so that makes it a little better 
I do feel like turning 30 is a big deal (and I will have a big party to match) and I hope I can be fairly intentional and reflective about the fact that it is a milestone. I’m sort of always having a career existential crisis, so turning 30 won’t make that any better or worse. But I think the area I want to focus more on is improving my overall fitness and health levels since it’s all downhill from now on. My family has the most rockin’ genes ever: high blood pressure, diabetes, breast cancer, colon cancer and more diabetes. A lot of that is prevented or made better by fitness and nutrition though.
Since I was about 10 I’ve been overweight and even though I played sports it didn’t get any better. In 2004 and 2005 I lost 38 pounds by making better food choices and learning more about healthy foods. I didn’t do any intentional exercise then, but I was living in DC and walking a bit everyday which helped I’m sure. Since moving back here I’ve gained 16 of that back, even though I’ve been a fairly consistent (maybe a little lazy) exerciser. To be a really healthy weight, I probably should lose that 16 pounds plus another 10 or so. Since losing about a pound a week seems to be ideal for doing it in a healthy way and being sure it’s long-term, and I also have about 30 weeks to go until I’m 30, it works out to be a pretty good plan. Thirty weeks would also be a little extra time too to make the goal since there’s some parties and holidays and vacation in there (which always includes lots of eating out and drinking–especially since PL wants me to go dancing, that’s even more drinking).
So, now my goals are public, and I have a deadline, so hopefully that will help me over the next 30 weeks. The end of Girl Scout cookie season will help too.
Since I’m a nerd I made a little Google docs spreadsheet with a list of the Monday’s between now and my birthday (October 15). I put a section for weight, and down the list I wrote goals according to weeks. For example, at 5 weeks, my goal is to lose 5 pounds. I also made a goal to focus on for each week, just to help break the overall project into smaller pieces. These goals are things like “run every other day this week” and some other things not as directly linked to weight loss, but are good for me like cutting down to 1 soda a day or less and eating vegetarian one day a week.
This week my goal to focus on is writing down what I’m eating. Just like when starting to budget your money, you first just write down what you spend to see where it goes, I want to start with writing down what I’m actually eating. Hopefully that will show me where I’m running into trouble and help me make the right changes. I don’t claim to be the most consistent exerciser, but I’ve been doing it and also gaining weight while doing it, so the formula is breaking down somewhere (beer? late night cereal? check, check).
I’m doing this on The Daily Plate, now hosted at Livestrong.com. It’s easy to enter foods and get accurate serving sizes, choose how much you actually ate, when you ate it, and see how many overall calories you’re eating. This seems helpful because we do fairly well with cooking healthy meals at home, but we don’t always eat just one serving of something and snacks really seem to be what do me in. I recognize that it’s not a controlled experiment just to write down what I’m eating, since I know that if I actually had to write down that I ate like 8 Girl Scout Samoas yesterday I probably would have stopped eating them at 1 or 2.
ATNTFTB: ‘Joy of Cooking’ or ‘Joy of Obesity’? February 17, 2009
Today was an uninspiring news day (Sen. Burris might be a bit shady after all? I never in a million years imagined that), but I did see this nugget of an article that came from the Los Angeles Times. I am in no way suggesting that this news source is comparable to the New York Times, only that I wasn’t inspired to blog about salmon brain injuries today or you know, any of the actual news.
This article is fascinating though, so even if I’m bending the rules, I hope you enjoy it just this once. In a comparison of 18 difference recipes in the Joy of Cooking–recipes that stuck around from the 1931 edition to today’s–researchers found that 14 of those recipes have increased their overall calorie counts by an average of 982 calories or 44% per recipe. The article notes several reasons for this calorie increase:
- Changing serving sizes–a 1997 waffle recipe made 12 waffles, the exact same ingredients made 6 waffles in 2006.
- Adding more of certain ingredients-beef stroganoff apparently needs a whole cup of sour cream these days, when just a decade ago it needed 3 tablespoons.
- Making substitutions to use more meat instead of vegetables-since meat was a lot more expensive in 1931, people ate less of it than we do now).
I did my own mini-study at home since I have both a 1976 and a 2005 copyright Better Home and Gardens New Cookbook (that’s the red checkered one). One recipe I often make from this cookbook is Banana Bread. Both recipes make the same size loaf, but in 1976 the recipe calls for 1/2 cup of sugar and 1/3 cup shortening. In 2005, you need a whole cup of sugar and a 1/2 cup of shortening. So, if you’re reading this and you are lucky enough to get to partake of my banana bread on occasion, I’m going to begin retro-themed baking and use the 1976 recipe. And I”ll also do my part to bring back Ham Medley and Company Creamed Tuna and maybe a nice elegant rice ring, since those recipes somehow were left out of the 2005 edition.
I often argue that eating at home instead of in a restaurant is one of the easiest ways to eat better and lose weight, and of course save money. But, as this study shows, our food troubles extend beyond restaurant fare and into our own cupboards. The article also briefly highlights the growing size of our plates and utensils–an actual serving of pasta looks tiny and unsatisfying on a giant plate so we eat more. PL and I got new “everyday” silverware recently (from my mom of course) to replace an older set my late aunt and uncle used for forty years. The new teaspoon is the size of the old soup spoon, and the new soup spoon? It won’t even fit in my mouth and we use it as a serving spoon. The trend is also noticeable with our new dinner plates (also from my mom–who needs to get married anyway?). We have a set of my grandma’s plates from the 1960s with a 10 inch diameter (most older plates are even 9 inches), and our new set of plates made in 2008 has a nearly 12 inch diameter–if we had older cabinets the dishes most likely would not fit in them.
Love, Wheat Love February 16, 2009
PL and I continued the trend of foiled Valentine’s Day plans again this year. First, I went to a funeral, in the rain, and then ate delicious Southern food made by Baptist church ladies and drove 4 hours back to Atlanta. PL and I decided to go out for a quiet dinner together once I got back home. We wanted to try out the recently renovated Thumbs Up Diner in Downtown Decatur. We had our first date at Crescent Moon, which used to be in that location (awww). Over the years we watched with horror as a new owner put up mirrors and linoleum tile on the walls and changed the menu. It became a Thumbs Up recently and while the decor didn’t go back to the original look (it might actually be nicer, not that we got to go inside as you will soon see), it no longer looks like a mob run hangout. It turns out they don’t serve dinner though, not even breakfast for dinner which is really the point of even having a diner.
We wandered around downtown Decatur for a while, realizing that 8pm on Valentine’s Day is not a great time to try to get into a restaurant. We ended up at a new spot on the square, Zucca, since there wasn’t a wait. It’s where Zocalo’s used to be if you’re a Decaturite, and it’s only been open about 3 weeks. Both the food and service were very good, and they have a variety of bar foods, pizzas, sandwiches, calzones and nicer Italian fare. We went for the nicer fare since it was Valentine’s Day and I had also just been to visit my parents–that means I had more money than usual. My parents won’t let me visit them without quietly slipping me cash before I leave. PL also usually has cash mysteriously appear in her wallet as well when she goes with me.
The restaurant is also open until 3-4am most days, which is a nice addition for Decatur. Full Disclosure: We’re usually asleep well before 11pm but you know, this one time we stayed up late and needed to eat and couldn’t find anything open so we complain how nothing is open late in Decatur. Zucca is quieter than the Brickstore next door and has more privacy since they have booths with tall backs instead of tiny tables crammed side by side. Each table also had it’s own little tv that you can control, so we’ll definitely hit it up again during March Madness when it’s more widely recognized to be romantic to watch basketball on a date than it is on Valentine’s Day.
PL succeeded in having the quote of the day, if not the month, while we were eating. I was drinking a seasonal Sam Adams beer and PL, who still doesn’t like beer, had a sip just in case she maybe just hasn’t found a beer she likes. Some wine and beer connoisseurs will describe the taste of a drink in reference to other foods–a hint of strawberry and apple overtones, for example. To PL, my beer tasted like “you took a beer and poured it over a giant bowl of Wheaties.” She makes me laugh.
Even better is that I just went to the Sam Adams website to see which beer was their seasonal beer on tap right now. It’s the White Ale, a beer which is an unfiltered wheat ale–whatever that means. The taste of the Sam Adams White Ale is described as, wait for it…”a crisp malty cereal finish.” So, PL is not only funny, she’s also quite the beer taster, even if not a beer drinker. I, on the other hand, will literally drink anything, and not really get what’s good and what’s bad. Just for future reference, Budweiser and Orange Juice mixed together is not at all like a mimosa, even at 3am when you are in college.
Holiday Roundup January 6, 2009
The timing of Christmas and New Year was nice this year and by taking just 4 vacation days, I was off for 12 whole days. We spent Christmas Eve at home and then had 2 friends and 2 dogs over for Christmas Eve dinner that we all cooked together.
Except for the tiny part where during dinner I noticed that the oven was smoking and we realized it freaked out and got really hot and burned a pecan chocolate pie to a crisp (pie FAIL), and then the part where Oliver ate about 1/4 of it while it sat smoking on the deck, oh and then the part where the oven wouldn’t turn back on and the manual said it needed to be serviced (Robert and Rhiannon turned off the circuit breaker and turned it back on, thereby miraculously fixing the oven, while Julia and I wondered how much it could cost to have someone fix a Jenn-Air stove, a lot we guessed),it was a terrific meal of spiral sliced ham, maccaroni and cheese, fancy cooked spinach, and green bean casserole.
Then we went to a lovely, and packed, Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols, despite incredibly heavy rain on the way there. After getting home close to 1am we assembled a breakfast casserole to cook on Christmas morning and went to bed in our new pajamas my mom sent us. My grandmother (my mom’s mom that I called Nanny) had a Christmas Eve birthday, she would have been 98 this year, and every year I got to open one present on Christmas Eve while we did her birthday stuff. The present was usually something I could use that evening like a book or a game, or this year, really awesome pajamas. Not awesome sarcastic, but awesome awesome pajamas, like fluffy and soft Nautica ones–and Scottie dogs!
Christmas morning was quiet and peaceful, full of our breakfast casserole and orange rolls (an O’Connor family tradition I’m more than happy to adopt, we skipped the cinnamon rolls since it was just us and we were leaving the next day) and fun presents. We did buy each other the same package of underwear, so one got returned later since having all the same patterns albeit in different sizes would just be too confusing for getting dressed at 7am. (see what hassles same sex couples go through!)
Then we packed and did more laundry (I feel like I did laundry every day during the holidays since we were in and out of town) got ready to fly to DC, and by DC I really mean the outer suburbs of Northern Virginia, to see family. We rented a car, and when we got to the lot to choose it, the first car we saw was a bright yellow Chevy Aveo with chrome handles and a spoiler, yikes. There was luckily one other car in the class of car we rented, and we felt bad for the schmuck that got off on the next shuttle since they would be driving that awful yellow one. You sure wouldn’t lose it in parking lot though. We saw Rhiannon’s parents, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and put lots of miles on the sporty non-yellow rental car. A highlight for me, in addition to staying with the cool aunt and uncle in a house with 6 large but well-trained and fun dogs, was that we got to see our dear friends Jean and Damon (Jean and I went to seminary together and they are Grey Grey’s previous family and the folks we pretend are the cool liberal parents we don’t have).
Then back home on Monday, and doing lots of nothingness and a few errands on Tuesday before cooking a few things for our usual New Year’s Eve party of board games and friends (rockin’ I know). PL made some fancy chocolate shells with whipped cream and blackberries and also made mini ham and cheese frittatas. I broke my “I hate to bake rule” and made chocolate covered peanut butter cheesecake pops. And just for the record, I don’t really hate to bake, but I do hate to follow directions and I also hate to make mistakes, and mistakes tend to happen when you don’t follow directions while baking, so it’s easier just to say I hate to bake.
The last prophetic words of 2008: “oh, that was bad,” spoken by me after sneaking a pre-midnight sip of what I thought wouldn’t be awful champagne, kinda like 2008–leaves a bad taste in your mouth but not quite as harsh after a few sips of alcohol.
Blog Post October 27, 2008
So, it’s been a while. Lots of stuff happening. Some sadness. Some comfort in sadness. More profound thoughts might come out of it later, but for now I’m more in the solitary, spending time at home mode. Blogging and Facebook don’t do it for me in regards to real emotions, call me old fashioned. Bring over a casserole and we’ll talk.
In other news:
We started back on the Dr. Phil diet plan today. I actually can’t stand to watch Dr. Phil (my parent DVR his show every day), but 4 years ago I lost about 40 pounds by following the food plan and PL lost 60 pounds. I’ve gained back 13 pounds in the past year or so, mostly the past few months by being lazy about exercise and eating way too many carbs…mmmm carbs. Poor Oliver has literally been on 3 walks since we’ve gotten him, like a month ago. And for the 3rd walk, I was cranky and napped on the couch, leaving PL alone to walk 2 crazy pups.
Whatever I think about Dr. Phil, the diet plan is really just an easy way to get organized about planning the kind of meals and snacks you need to eat…whole, unprocessed foods, more vegetables, less carbs (and by less it’s really just a more appropriate amount than most of us eat). We jokingly refer to the way we both lost so much weight as the “Eat Some Goddamn Vegetables” diet plan. It starts with 2 weeks of pretty limited carbs just to get you started and detoxed from sugar and everything. It’s actually not terrible, but ask me again at 4pm–the time everyday I normally get hungry and eat lots of crackers.
From the Garden October 3, 2008
I feel a little bad showing this picture, given Rev Mama’s basil challenges, yet here is our herb garden in all of it’s basil-filled glory. Other things are there too, they just aren’t quite as bossy and bold as the basil.
Now that the weather is cooler I will soon take the shears to the herb garden, cut all of this back, and bring a few things inside to hopefully survive until Spring. Even before we had our house and our small garden, I dreamed of an herb garden that would provide a summer’s bounty of beautiful garnishes, homemade pesto, and roasted chickens fragrant with herbs I had snipped just seconds before.
When my dad was at our house on Memorial Day (his birthday this year), he was helping us with a drainage problem in the yard. To spruce up the newly shoveled dirt when he finished, he created a little bed with some ornamental plants. I also told him we wanted to plant an herb garden, and when I was at work the next day, he bought Basil, Lavender, Thyme, Sage, Dill, and Rosemary and planted them beside the house for us. A co-worker gave me some mint, and I added that too.
The herbs all looked so small and fragile at first, struggling to survive in the drought , the summer sun, and the Georgia red clay. I would gently snip off a leaf or two of basil to put on homepage pizza. PL and I would pick a single leaf of mint each as we passed the garden when beginning our evening walk, inhale it’s freshness and savor it’s taste as we headed down the street with the dog. One day I felt daring and cut off large branches of sage and thyme to season a chicken I was roasting. Soon though, we saw the herbs needed very little care or gentleness to thrive, and we just left it to do it’s thing. We let things bloom and go to seed. The sage staged a hostile takeover of the mint’s property, and stole it’s sun. The thyme gave up it’s fight against the basil and hugged close to the ground, mingled with clover and grass that crept into the bed.
Fall is my favorite season, but it also comes with a little sadness that winter will soon arrive with the cold and darkness I so dislike. That sadness is also mixed with regret that the herb garden I imagined, and the kindness of my dad for creating it as a surprise, was not used or appeciated enough. Last night though, as we felt the chill in the air and picked what may be the last tomatoes, I snipped a bouguet of each of the herbs to take to a friend’s house, and gathered up the freshest looking basil leaves I could find.
This is the result.
Red and yellow heirloom tomatoes and fresh basil from the herb garden, topped with fresh mozzarella from milk that we churned from the cow that we own….well not that part. I did get the good stuff from the farmer’s market floating in the whey (20% off even).
What’s For Dinner? September 19, 2008
Our recipe file has finally reached an unmanageable state of chaos. Even calling it a file implies a certain basic level or organization that we are lacking. Spread throughout the house–a bookshelf in the living room, a microwave cart in the dining room (classy right?–it’s being used as a china cabinet which is even better), in the magazine rack, on the kitchen counter and even by the bed, we have recipes everywhere. Somehow we’ve been able to remember whether to look for a taped down recipe in a composition book (a long-ago failed attempt at recipe wrangling), find the brown sugar or olive oil speckled piece of paper and check for the post-it book mark in a certain Cooking Light. How we manage to locate anything is somewhat of a mystery, but it’s time to do something better.
I’d like to introduce you to the Olliff-O’Connor family recipe blog. I’ve set up the categories of Main Dish, Side Dish, Salad, Dessert, Bread and Drink and will also use more specific tags (like “chicken”) to organize things and make it easily searchable.
