Rice For Dinner

Sometimes you just have one of those days, you know? You go downstairs to make dinner, and you're excited because it's going to be some kind of cool sweet-and-sour thing over rice that you came up with compiled from various recipes. It's really easy, too--just put some random stuff (dates, sugar, water, cumin, tamarind extract, stuff like that) in the food processor and process it until it's done. But, for whatever reason, it doesn't work. It's disgusting. You try to fix it, to balance the ingredients, but it doesn't want to be fixed. It remains inedible. You could try harder-you know you could probably fix this somehow-but your heart's just not in it today. You're all stressed, for whatever reason--your former housemate is exhibiting creepy and potentially dangerous behavior, you're worried about your teaching practicum starting on Wednesday, you may potentially be changing jobs for the third time in the past 9 months, all your housemates are gone for the weekend and you're lonely, you're lonely even when all your housemates are here. All of the above, if you're me. You wonder if you used up all your kitchen mojo making that really delicious herb quick bread a couple hours ago. Either way, your attempt at dinner goes down the drain, the belch of the garbage disposal seeming to say that even it doesn't want it. Your rice, however, came out perfectly.

And that's when you do it. That's when you have plain steamed rice for dinner, seasoned with a little bit of fish sauce and sesame oil. You make some chai tea to soften the blow of your finished dinner product being a bowl of plain rice. You think nostalgically of the days when ruining dinner gave you a free pass to order in...back when you had a guaranteed job and your parents were paying for your schooling and you didn't have rent to pay. You write blog entries where you amp up the drama of the situation, because humor is the best medicine, and you hope that new readers to the blog don't think you're always this overdramatic (and also self-referencing).


The upside: my parents are coming to take me out to brunch tomorrow. And after a dinner like that, I'll definitely be hungry!

Catching Up

Well, that time has come again. The time when, periodically, I deposit a whole bunch of pictures onto this blog, food pictures I never got around to writing about or weren't particularly interesting to write about. Think of it as a bit of a snapshot of the time that's passed since I moved back to Maryland!

Over the summer, while Noah and I lived in New Windsor, we had a burst of DIY inspiration that involved making pickles! They were delicious.

Fresh sage from our window garden! When it got to be winter I dried all the sage by hanging it from a hair tie on the window. I'm really looking forward to doing some more gardening (mostly of things that can be grown in pots, because I'm only renting the house I'm living in now) soon.



Some yummy-looking type of fried rice concoction.



These may not look like much, but they are amazing homemade chicken nuggets! I don't know why I survived on frozen chicken nuggets all through college when I could have been eating these.

Pasta with made-from-scratch tomato sauce! I was really happy with the way this came out. It's such a simple thing to make, but the sauce came out so well, with giant chunks of tomato and lots of seasoning.

Until next time, I hope you had a happy new year!

Tuna and Tomato Pasta, Stage 1: Denial

I've never been a fan of tuna. And by "never been a fan", I mean that most times the very thought of tuna makes me want to throw up. I have an ingenious reason for why this is--when my mom was pregnant with me and my twin sister, she had a strong aversion to tuna, which made her want to throw up. She also had strong cravings for baked potatoes and for milkshakes. Which, by that logic, is why to this day I hate tuna and love baked potatoes and milkshakes, right? Well, not really. I recognize that baked potatoes and milkshakes are not exactly obscure cravings, and I find that most people don't like the smell of tuna, which is really what puts me off.

Within the past few months, I gave tuna a semi-fair shot for the first time. It's all thanks to Noah--when my parents pull the whole "just try a little bit and see if you like it" thing I usually respond with "but I don't like it why do you keep trying to make me eat things I don't like?". But recently Noah did the same thing. "But Noah," I said, "I don't like tuna. You know that." But he didn't have to ask too many times before I agreed to at least try it. I believe my reaction was "I guess it's not quite as terrible as I thought it was." It helps that Noah rarely steers me wrong on the food front--he was the one who convinced me that not all hot dogs were disgusting, and that mustard can be okay in some preparations (not that I've actually touched the mustard in the fridge, and in fact this hasn't stopped me from pretending it's not mine). One tip that I have for people trying to get their kids/significant others/friends to like tuna is not to make tuna salad the first thing you try. While it may seem logical to throw them into the fire in that way, introducing someone to tuna through something that is composed entirely of tuna with virtually no other flavors to complement it is very daunting. When Noah left to move back to New York and left me all his food products, included in those food products were two cans of tuna*. The only thing I knew how to make with tuna was tuna salad, and I just didn't think I could stomach that. Luckily, just then I came upon a recipe for tuna and tomato pasta. It seemed perfect to me because the tomato flavor would balance out the tuna and would make the whole tuna-eating experience a lot easier.

Because of my extreme denial that I was eating tuna, the recipe that I linked to was really only the jumping-off point for the dish I made. My dish had two main considerations: 1) I needed the tuna to be a little more sneakily incorporated into the dish than the recipe seemed to want to do, and 2) I didn't have any of the ingredients on hand except for the two cans of tuna, the seasonings, and one 28-oz can of tomatoes, which would have to substitute for the fresh ones. Here's my, uh...recipe.

How to Make Tuna And Tomato Pasta If You "Don't Like" Tuna:
1. Start your pasta going first--the sauce takes only a couple minutes to throw together, so you'll have some downtime while the water boils and stuff. Choose an appealing-looking pasta--I chose campanelle because I'd never used them before, they looked like they'd hold sauce really well, and they were adorable.
2. At about the time your water is boiling and you're ready to dump the pasta in, heat up a little olive oil in a large pan or skillet. If you're like me, take 5 tries to open the cans of tuna, pondering the great mystery of why, with all your skills in the kitchen, you still can't seem to operate a can opener correctly. Once the oil is all sizzly, dump in your 2 cans of tuna. Immediately use your wooden scraper or other implement to mash the tuna into the tiniest possible pieces, so that when you eat the finished product the individual bites of tuna will be relatively small.
3. Let that tuna cook in there for awhile, basically until you get tired of waiting around. I found it took me about as long as it took the pasta to finish cooking, so like 5-8 minutes. It didn't change terribly noticeably during that time, which is why I say just kind of keep cooking it until you think "yeah, I guess that's good".
4. Dump in your tomatoes. How much of the can you use depends on just how much you want to hide that tuna. I dumped in part of the can, but that didn't look like enough, so I put in more and then discovered I'd actually used the entire 28-oz can. If you hadn't caught on by now to the fact that this isn't a meal you should be making if you're interested in a finely nuanced dish where all the flavors come out, it should be dawning on you right about here. This dish has two purposes: to satiate hunger, and to get protein from the tuna without noticing you're doing it.
5. "Chop" your tomatoes by repeatedly stabbing them with your scraper or other implement until they come apart. I would have bought diced tomatoes if I knew this was what I was using it for, but all I had were whole peeled ones. I used a combination of a scraper and the slotted spoon from the pasta to get the tomatoes into pieces. Stir this whole mixture around and let it do its thing for a few more minutes.
6. Season with whatever appropriate seasonings you have lying around. I used a lot of oregano, and then as an afterthought I put in some of a bottle I found in the cupboard that was labeled "Italian Seasoning", which was probably just more oregano, but I used it anyway. Stir around and you're good to go!

I'm eating it right now, and my verdict is that it did what I wanted it to do: I can taste the tuna a little bit, but it is heavily offset by the large amount of tomato I put in. It does not make me want to throw up. I have a rather large bowl, and I will eat all of it and will continue to do so for the next few days.

Of course, some of you are probably thinking, "but Florence! This is kind of cheating, isn't it? How will you ever experience the glories of tuna if you make dishes where you can't even taste it?" The answer, my friends, is baby steps. This is just one stage in the tuna journey. I'm sure I'll reach Acceptance eventually. But for now, a bowl of this is a big accomplishment.

What are your favorite tuna recipes? If I'm at the store and convince myself to actually buy more tuna (which would be an even bigger step), maybe I'll make them!

*When I told my sister that I was making tuna and tomato pasta despite my aversion to tuna, she said, "but if you don't like tuna, why not give it away? You don't have to eat it." My response: "no, no, I have to do this, I should broaden my horizons!". What I meant: "I don't have a lot of money and that tuna will bring me at least 3 meals and then I won't have to go grocery shopping in the next couple days." The fact that Noah left me all his food when he moved has probably halved the amount that I've had to go grocery shopping these past couple month, but now that stockpile is running pretty low. Pretty much all I have left is a bottle of clam juice, a can of red curry paste, that poor lonely jar of mustard, and about 5 different kinds of vinegar (we here at the FBTS homestead are serious about our vinegar).

Also, an additional safety note: daydreaming while washing out tuna cans is a Bad Idea! My mind was totally somewhere else while I was rinsing those cans earlier (I think I was thinking something along the lines of "I have a headache, I'm sleepy, why do I have to go to work tomorrow"), and I grabbed the tuna can on the unfriendly end (the part of the top that gets exposed when you used the can opener on it). The sharp edge of the top was like, "Hahahaha! I kill you! *slice*" and then I was bleeding. Cooking is dangerous, kids. Or at least, doing the recycling is.

soups and stews: the official beginning of fall

Hello again! As usual, much has happened in the world of FBTS since you last heard from us. Most important for this blog, Noah went back to New York in search of greener employment pastures (there's not too much around here in terms of full-time work), so we are cooking and eating separately. But we're still doing a lot of cooking and eating, of course! Here is what's going on over on my side of things.

To start with, I love cookbooks. Noah isn't so much of a fan, he prefers to make things off-the-cuff, but while I enjoy doing that too, for the most part I love picking through cookbooks and getting new inspiration. There will be days when large portions of my day are spent rummaging around in cookbooks and food blogs looking for new and delicious things to do! Those are the best kinds of days. :-) My cookbook library is steadily growing, with plenty of standbys as well as new and quirky additions (I recently picked up two childrens' cookbooks from Goodwill--I don't have any kids, but childrens' cookbooks appealed strongly to the five-year-old inside me).

A little while after I moved into the house where I live with three other young people (who also love food, so we're getting along great), I was flipping through a cookbook called Ethnic Cuisine, which Noah gave to me as a Christmas present a couple years back. All the recipes look great-in fact, as I flip through it now I find several more I want to tackle soon-but when I looked through it a few weeks ago I didn't even get past the first couple pages, because the first two recipes in the book looked so good. Here are my takes on a couple of her soup recipes. Check out the actual book for the real versions, because mine were sometimes altered significantly based on what I had lying around.

Turmeric Yogurt Soup (adapted from Ethnic Cuisine, by Lorraine Turner):
1/3 cup all-purpose flour (she suggests gram flour, but I didn't have any. You miss some of the deeper taste by using AP, but it's definitely doable)
1 tsp. ground turmeric
1/4 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 3/4 cups plain yogurt
2 tbsp. vegetable oil (you can also use peanut oil, or, even better, ghee)
3 cups water

I didn't really garnish it with anything, she suggests oil, cumin seeds, black mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds, and whole fresh red chilies.

1. Mix the flour, turmeric, chili powder, and salt together, then beat in the yogurt with a whisk (or fork) until there are no more lumps.
2. Heat the oil (or melt the ghee) in a heavy-bottom pan over medium-high heat. Mix in the yogurt mixture and then the water, whisking constantly. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat way down and simmer for about 8 minutes (keep whisking it fairly frequently; I didn't hover over it whisking it and it still turned out fine), until the soup thickens slightly. Taste and season!

I was worried originally that my soup wasn't thick enough (it didn't look nearly as thick as the soup in the picture, but it thickens up after a little while, and significantly more in the fridge. I didn't garnish it at all, and ate it with bread to mop it all up. The tangy yogurt made for a very unique soup that was different from anything I'd ever had before (especially since I hadn't eaten much plain yogurt before this year; I'm switching over to organic plain yogurt with fruit instead of store-bought yogurt because I want fewer additives in my food).

Tunisian Garlic and Chickpea Soup (adapted from Ethnic Cuisine, by Lorraine Turner):
8 tbsp. olive oil (or appx.; I didn't measure)
12 garlic cloves, very finely chopped (I only used 8 because I ran out of garlic)
3 cups chickpeas, soaked overnight (I think I only used 2 cups because I ran out of chickpeas--clearly I was unprepared for this soup)
2 1/2 quarts water
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. ground coriander (both of those are her measures, again I just put in "some" of each)
1 or 2 carrots, very finely chopped (smaller measures are what I had on hand)
1 or 2 onions, very finely chopped
4 or 6 celery stalks, very finely chopped
Juice of 1 lemon (it doesn't say it's optional but it totally is; I skipped it)
4 tbsp. chopped fresh cilantro, plus extra sprigs to garnish (I forgot to add it, so I used it solely as a garnish)
salt and pepper

1.Heat half the oil in a large, heavy-bottom pan over low heat. Add garlic and cook, stirring frequently, for 2 minutes. Add the chickpeas (drain them first), water, cumin, and ground coriander. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until tender (she says 2 1/2 hours, but it's really based on your stove. I'm pretty sure mine was done in a little over an hour, though I did use fewer than the stated ingredients).
2. While that's cooking, heat the rest of the oil in a separate pan. Add the carrots, onions, and celery, then cover and cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes.
3. Stir the vegetables into the pan of chickpeas. Transfer about half the soup to a food processor (or blender) and process until smooth. (This step shouldn't be skipped! It gives the soup a cool variation in texture.) Mix the puree back in with the rest of the soup, and add in the lemon juice little by little, tasting all the way, if you used it. Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with cilantro!

This soup was a total winner in my book! It was hearty and filling, and even with reducing the ingredients it made enough soup to last me for days. I will definitely be making it again as we go into fall and winter.

The last recipe I wanted to share with you is actually a link to a recipe. While Noah's food niche tends to lean toward the Asian food side of cooking, I have always been interested in traditional Latin American recipes. It's hard to find these written down in many places, but I did find a gorgeous Ecuadorian food blog called Laylita's Recipes, and I want to cook practically everything she writes about! The blog appears to be defunct, because she hasn't updated in a long time, but paging through the back entries of the blog has given me a lot of great ideas. I hope to try lots of her recipes in the coming weeks! This week, I was going to make a large quantity of her menestra de porotos, or bean stew, to eat by myself; in an unexpected turn of events, though, Noah surprised me with a visit this week, so we got to try the recipe out together. :-) I loved it! It was a good, filling stew that is sure to turn into a staple winter meal for me. I served it with the fried egg on top, and avocado slices on the side--over rice, of course. Since then I've been eating the leftovers over pasta, and tonight for dinner I'm probably going to bake a couple potatoes and spoon more bean stew over those! Check out the link and try it for yourselves!

That's all for now! Until next time!

A perfect breakfast for a rainy day

Instead of waking up to my alarm this morning, I woke up to a nice big thunderstorm! While I love thunderstorms, my favorite way to experience them is when I have a nice long day off to stay in and watch the rain...which was not the case today. Like every weekday, I accompany Noah into town when he goes to work, hang out at the college library for a few hours, go to my own job, and then hang out at the public library for a while until Noah picks me up (such is the life of a couple with only one car, and I haven't fully learned to ride my new bike yet, so I can't get around that way, unfortunately). I didn't feel like having breakfast at home this morning because I was a bit slow and didn't want to rush through breakfast, so I decided to eat in Westminster.

My favorite place to eat breakfast in Westminster (possibly my favorite place to eat in general, except for this place), is the Heinz Bakery. I've been there 3 times so far, usually just to pick up a cinnamon doughnut for a snack. I have a serious love for cinnamon doughnuts, and Heinz makes a great one. Today, I decided to get one of their breakfast sandwiches as well. I got a bacon and egg sandwich, and paid extra to have tomato on it as well. It was delicious--the sunflower bread I chose to have it on was extremely tasty, different from your regular white or wheat options but not too jarring. The bacon and egg were nicely cooked, and I was glad I got tomato on it because it complemented everything really well. This place is clearly where most people in town go to meet and talk and have breakfast, and the people running the place seemed to know almost everyone, as well as what they usually got. The staff was warm and friendly, and the place has a nice atmosphere--sparsely decorated, but the emphasis is on good food and good people. I foresee many more breakfasts at Heinz in the years that I live here. :-D

PS-Did I mention that the whole sandwich (with tomato as an extra), cinnamon doughnut, and glass of water came out to $4.25 total? That might be the best part. :-)

Heinz Bakery
42 West Main Street,
Westminster, MD 21157-4816

things I didn't know about garlic

Garlic, I'm sure most of us will agree, is a pretty awesome food. Not only is it delicious, but it has some pretty spectacular health benefits, so much so that it can be used medicinally as well as being eaten. Like regular medicines, though, it can have side effects, which still occur when you're just eating it as part of a delicious meal, particularly when you eat it raw.

Such was the case with the seemingly innocuous pasta salad that Noah and I made a few days ago. It was your standard pasta salad, with farfalle and fresh tomatoes and fresh, raw garlic. Not aware of the potential side effects of eating raw garlic, I was completely unsuspecting. I ate for a little while, munching through some raw garlic, and then all of a sudden I was hit with an instantaneous wave of nausea. Like, "wow, I'm going to throw up in approximately 30 seconds"-type nausea. So I waited (near the bathroom, just in case) and after a couple minutes it just disappeared. This confused me, but Noah was coming down with a cold at that point, and my body acts pretty weird when it's getting sick, so I thought maybe I was getting it too. Also I remember being pretty ravenous when I was eating, so I thought it was possible that I had eaten too fast.

Then, a few minutes ago, we settled down to have some leftovers for dinner, and I immediately decided to finish the pasta salad. I didn't think I would have any problems, but soon after I started eating it, boom--unhappy tummies. Since I had the sense to stop eating right when I noticed it, it just went away a few seconds later, which is when I decided to search "garlic nausea" on Google. Turns out feeling nauseous after eating raw garlic is totally something that happens! I never knew. At least it's not garlic in general--I don't know if I could get by without using garlic in my cooking. ;-)

Have you guys ever had problems with eating garlic? Do you know of any other foods that have "side effects"?

Pride goeth before a fall

Everyone has to fail in the kitchen sometimes. Even the most experienced cooks and bakers, and especially the novice ones, should expect to make a lot of mistakes and have results that end up pretty much inedible. I am an extremely novice cook, so I should have expected that my first try at a pie dough would not go over so well. But I'd been thinking about making Celery and Onion Pies, from a baking book we got at Goodwill, for days. I'd spent much more time imagining the perfect result that was going to come out of the oven than I spent actually making sure I knew how to make pie dough. I entered the kitchen this morning with a feeling I can only describe as "hubris". And at first things went really well. The filling, which was a super-easy mixture of celery, onion, garlic, salt, and a little milk and flour, went spectacularly. I had remembered to put my dough ingredients in the fridge so they would be nice and cold when I made the dough. I sifted the flour and salt, rubbed the butter in with my fingers, and mixed it until it looked approximately like dough is supposed to when the butter is mixed in. Then the recipe didn't call for nearly enough water to make a dough, so I had to put some more water in, and a little more flour to balance it out. I slapped it onto one of our counters to roll it out, and here's where I ran into problems.

At the same time as my dough got progressively warmer because our kitchen does not circulate air at all, I used too much flour to roll out the dough. The addition of the water made the dough just slightly sticky, so to ease it in rolling out I added a little bit of flour. I started rolling out the dough, but after just a little while the steadily warming dough started to tear and get too thin. I added more flour. I rolled it out. Every now and then, more flour found its way onto the counter and the dough. By the time I'd managed to roll out a sufficient quantity of dough, everything was probably pretty heavily floured. Did I mention that I used an empty bottle of Arrogant Bastard ale in lieu of a rolling pin? Because I totally did.

Then it was time for Mistake #2. I neglected to check to see if the muffin tin I was going to use to bake these pies in was actually the right size for the job. Turns out it was way too big. In the pretty pictures that accompany the recipe in the cookbook, the pies come up to the top of the pan, but mine only made it about halfway. Next time I make this I'll definitely just make bigger and fewer pies. Determined not to accept complete and total failure, I managed to slap the pies together and throw them in the oven.

The recipe calls for 15-20 minutes in the oven, but after that time they just weren't looking right. I left them in for a little while longer, and then called my mom, who was currently helping my sister pack up her stuff for her imminent move. "Mom," I said, "I have these pies in the oven that turned out really badly, and here's my question: I know what the pies are supposed to look like when you do them right, but how do I know whether I should leave these in the oven for longer or whether they're as done as they're going to get?" I described them to her (as "the dough looks about like it did when I rolled it out, except drier", and she counseled me to admit defeat and take them out.

Talking to my sister on the phone later, I told her I was disappointed that the pies hadn't turned out well, but that I'd had a lot of fun making them. I love getting messy (I'm secretly a five-year-old), and this allowed me to get flour all over myself and the kitchen, including the countertops, sink, floor, table, dishes, and refrigerator door handle. Plus, since the filling actually did turn out to be delicious, I was just going to scrape it out and use it over pasta or rice as a delicious snack.

"Well," she told me, "I think you can call that a win."

Caribbean Kitchen; or, A Good Way to Beat Rush Hour

A couple days ago, Noah and I were driving home after picking up our CSA share when we ran into some big traffic problems. An accident had closed off Route 140, pretty much the only way into Westminster from the Baltimore area, and everywhere else was severely clogged with rush-hour traffic. After driving on Route 26 for a little while, we decided we'd had enough and we would stop at the first interesting-looking restaurant we could find on Route 26. Soon enough, when we spotted a small yellow building called Caribbean Kitchen, were immediately intrigued.

Caribbean Kitchen is exactly the kind of restaurant I like to visit. It's small, friendly, unassuming, and the prices are as reasonable as the food is delicious. We shared an excellent jerk chicken meal, which came with the chicken and sides of rice and peas, plantains, and cabbage. The cabbage wasn't all that exciting, but it complemented everything else well. And I love plantains, so this was very exciting for me! The chicken was pretty spicy, but not as spicy as the person who took our order made it sound (maybe people in the area don't have as much of a tolerance for heat as we do?). It did come with a sauce on the side which had a nice kick, though.

As we left, the person at the front asked how we liked our meal and mentioned that she was surprised we had enjoyed the spicy chicken. "Oh, it wasn't that spicy", we demurred. "Really?", she said. "Well, next time you come, I'll make it real spicy for you." I can't wait!

Caribbean Kitchen
8139 Liberty Road,
Windsor Mill, MD 21244-3043
(410) 496-6222

PS-Today we're experiencing another good kind of food--the down-home church dinner! There's a Methodist church next door to our apartment that's serving an all-you-can-eat dinner tonight. How can we not check it out?

Happy 4th of July!

FBTS wishes you a very happy 4th of July. :-) I love a good holiday as much as the next person, but the 4th of July is my least favorite holiday. Mainly because of the fireworks--I dislike loud noises, and things with a negative environmental impact. But, like most people, we did eat traditional 4th of July food: burgers, with a delicious improvised pasta salad on the side. Yum. :-D

summer food

Well, summer is officially here in Maryland, as evidenced by the crushing heat and humidity that makes me want to do nothing but sit in bed reading with the fans on and watch Food Network. Neither Noah nor I are particularly summer people, and the fact that neither of us wants to move, combined with my near-constant state of dehydration (I become extremely easily dehydrated, so summer is very difficult for me) makes us highly unmotivated to step into the kitchen and cook. It's a shame, because we're getting a lovely share from our CSA, and we're visiting local produce markets as often as possible, so we have plenty to cook with.

As we were sitting around yesterday moaning about the fact that we (as usual) didn't feel like cooking dinner, it occurred to me: the CrockPot. My parents were given a CrockPot as a gift recently from one of my dad's parishoners (he's a minister), and since my family already has one they gave it to us. It was definitely a lifesaver--we just cut up some veggies, and a few hours of blissfully not being in the kitchen later, we had a delicious stew. Bonus points: it was filling (most summer foods that we feel like preparing end up being things like salads, and since both Noah and I have crazy high metabolisms we need to eat more than that), and it made the whole apartment smell delicous with very little work. :-)


In other food-related news, Noah and I have started a little herb garden on our living room window. We've been interested in growing our own food since before we were a couple (possibly sparked by reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle together on a long train trip while in Italy a few years back), and a good way to dip your toes into growing your own food is with herbs. We have a parsley plant that was given to us by our CSA, and at the farmer's market we purchased a sage plant and a basil plant. We definitely love them. :-D