Novemba Novemba

I have been working early and late lately. Luckily, it's not one great long stint. I get a break in between classes/clients. Today I needed to cook. I was thinking about why I often prefer baking to cooking. What I came up with was this: when you bake, the goods can be saved for later. Often, however, savories should be enjoyed right as they come off the heat/out of the oven/get tossed together, etc. As with any rule, there are exceptions to this one. Soups, breads, dips, chicken, tuna, or egg salads. All of this helped me decide what to create today. At the top we have roasted acorn squash. Simply seasoned with salt, pepper, and olive oil.

Here are the acorn squash seeds, with almonds, cinnamon, egg white, splenda, and kosher salt. Baked in a 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes...stirring occasionally.

This is what my cute mom calls "Really Good Veggie Soup". I could eat it at every meal for the rest of my life and die with a happy belly.

This is just pureed cottage cheese with spices. It's tasty for dipping veggies in when you need a handy snack.
That's all for now, as I must get ready to go back to work!

Monday Night Dinner

I was wanting some healthy comfort food. Warm veggies, melted cheese, etc.
I stuffed pounded chicken breast with sundried tomato basil feta and field greens.
Sauteed apple and sweet walla walla onion to put on top of field greens and celery with a honey dijon balsamic vin. Melted provolone and garlic/parsley seasoning into a cubed (but not sliced all the way through) mini-baguette.
Lastly, I sauteed some green beans with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon.

YUM.

These cookies sucked.

I wanted to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Mostly cause I love the dough. I also wanted to do something autumnal. What comes to mind? Pumpkin. Yay! Pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. What a BRILLIANT idea! Right? Right? OhOhOh so wrong. They didn't flatten enough, the pumpkin was too strong, and they had an aftertaste to boot! (Maybe due to too much nutmeg, or perhaps because I used whole grain white flour??? I don't know).
















I am not posting this recipe, as I promise you don't need it in your arsenal.


Even though the cookies sucked, I liked the photos. What a waste of good ingredients.

Yeah, I was a vegetarian for ten years...

For some reason, in recent time, Sunday night has become "steak night" at our house. Sunday night is often the only time the whole family gets together for a meal. Lately, my brother Grady's lovely girlfriend Whitney has been joining us for Sunday night dinner. It was certainly not on purpose, but I think the first half dozen times she came over, we managed to be serving red meat. One night we had to promise her we'd fix something different the next weekend.


This evening though, I am oh-so-thankful for steak Sunday. Look at the gloooorious salads we created! As I was a vegetarian for a decade, I still love my veggies. The steak is such an integral part of this meal though! Even just for the color contrast. Ricky grilled a rosemary and balsamic marinated flank steak on the kingsize Weber, aptly named Bubbaque. I roasted some sweet Mayan onion, and some mushrooms with balsamic. Other goodies on the plate include blanched broccoli and cauliflower, mixed field greens, garden fresh mister stripey and sun sugar tomatoes, red bell pepper, raw red onion, and french bread crisped on the grill with some butter and mediterranean sea salt/garlic mixture. I made a dijon dressing, Jenni chose Newman's own light balsamic vin, and Ricky loves Litehouse Chunky Bleu Cheese. The bleu cheese really is fantastic with the red onion, the cruciferous veg, and of course, the steak...so Jenni and I used up some of that too.


Grady and Whitney couldn't make it for dinner tonight, but this is one steak Sunday they'll probably be sad they missed out on. Oh well, there's always next weekend!

The second cheapest therapy session I know...

The kitchen is a place where I can quiet my mind. I can focus simply on the task at hand. I freely admit that this quieting of the mind is not something I am very good at. Which is precisely why I had to bake today. My father told my mother to tell me not to bake...but I had to do it anyway. I tried to respect his wishes by compromising a bit. I made a very small batch of cookies. I even put them in the freezer and gave some away to a neighbor, so as to hide the evidence. Said cookies are still in the tupperware I packed them up in. They have migrated however, from the freezer to the countertop...that was NOT my doing. I left them there.
These are my most recent attempt at "healthy" cookies. Healthier...but as has recently been brought to my attention by the newly health conscious Cookie Monster, cookies (whether healthy or traditional) are a "sometimes food". The Cookie Monster's lost his cookie eatin' gusto.
Here's the recipe.





Whole Grain Lower Sugar Cookies

4 T. unsalted butter, softened
1/3 c. sugar
21 splenda packets
1 egg
1 t. vanilla extract
1 t. almond extract
2 c. White whole wheat flour
1/2 t. baking soda
1/4 t. salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream together sugar, splenda, and butter until light and fluffy. Add egg and extracts. Mix well. Add dry ingredients and beat on medium until thoroughly incorporated. At this point you could either roll your dough into a log and slice it, or you can roll it out and use cookie cutters. I did the latter. I rolled my dough quite thick, and ended up getting about 2 dozen cookies.

You could leave them unfrosted. I actually thought they were quite lovely that way. A sweet wheaty biscuit. I felt like decorating, however.

Easy Frosting

2 T. butter
1/8 c. milk
2 c. powdered sugar
1 t. vanilla or almond extract
any desired food coloring

Mix ingredients together and frost away! This frosting is very forgiving...you can thin it out with more milk, you can thicken it up with more powdered sugar.

Oh yes. The most important part of this post. I didn't realize that I needed to flour my cookie cutters until late in the game. For this reason, the ghost's skinny little hands were sticking in the cutters. Rather than try to squish them back onto their arms, I decided it would be fitting to bloody their extremeties instead. Ghoulish little halloween cookies, they became.

Okay. Okay. Salt City...SAVORIES!

• It may be once in a blue moon that you get one of these posts. Why? I tend to eat the same things most days, no reason to take pictures of big bowls of vegetables, little bowls (sometimes huge) of cottage cheese, grilled chicken, turkey breast, etc. That being said, this night I made:

Veggie stuffed spring rolls with two dipping sauces. One mildish, one uber spicy.

Lettuce wraps with onion, chicken, water chestnut, and cilantro filling.

That little bowl is spicy coconut brown rice.

In case you hadn't figured it out for yourself...I L.O.V.E. veggies. I love spice. I should eat more whole grains. Grains in general really. Let's dub them carbomohydrates. I've somehow let myself become "scared" of them since society went insane with their Atkins Approach or whatever it has been dubbed.

Pizza, say you?

OOoooh, I'm sorry. You thought you were getting savories.
Alas...

FRUIT PIZZAS! These lovelies consist of a sugar cookie base (made with oat flour), a sweetened cream cheese, and all sorts of fresh fruit.

They really are an easy dessert option. They are, however, somewhat time consuming. I am a bit of a perfectionist and don't appreciate when fruit pieces become oddly shaped/sized, or I'm out of whack on my fruit placement. The second pizza got off kilter too long before I realized it, and the fruit had happily settled into the cream cheese...I didn't de and reconstruct this day.