Experimenting with Chili

I have a confession to make: I don’t have a go to chili recipe.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I always  fall back on my Mom’s chili recipe, which I love.  But in my ongoing journey of learning to be a better cook, I wanted to experiment a little and try different chili recipes. Go beyond the beefy, tomato-ey concoction that my mom frequently serves and find my own recipe.

I’ve only actually tried one other recipe, a brown sugar chili, which I highly enjoy.  But, I decided it was time to branch out to a new recipe this week.

So, while my dinner (roasted vegetables) sat in the oven, I made this lovely meal that screams “take me to work for lunch.”

I had bought ground turkey instead of ground beef at the grocery store on Sunday. Yes, I still enjoy red meat, but I randomly decided to go with the turkey  this time. I surfed the Web at lunch today looking for recipes, but I couldn’t decide on one I liked, so I made one up.

___________________

Ingredients: Pound of ground turkey/beef, 2 1/2 cups tomato juice, 1/4 cup green pepper pieces, two 15 oz can of kidney beans, drained, 1 tbsp chili powder, 1 tbsp garlic powder

Directions: Brown meat in big pot over high heat and then add the remaining ingredients. Then allow to simmer for 20 minutes before serving.

____________________

OK, a few things. First, I always get the ground turkey thinking it’s better for me and it really doesn’t taste that different than ground beef. It may be better for me , but it does not taste the same. And honestly, with chili, I like the ground beef taste.

Now, that I’ve gotten that off my chest, the recipe. I like it, but I think I want a stronger tomato taste. I realized looking back at Mom’s recipe that she uses tomato sauce rather than juice, which I’m sure has an impact on the overall effect.

Also, if you do not like garlic, you will not like this recipe. The garlic taste is so strong.  Luckily, I love garlic, so it doesn’t really bother me much. However, overall, I think I’d like a little more tomato, a little less garlic. I might try it next time with the tomato sauce and see how that works because I think this combo of ingredients has promise. I just have to figure out the right measurements.

OK, with that, it’s off to bed. I have an 8 a.m. meeting tomorrow, so I’m setting the alarm for 6 a.m. Wish me luck in getting up!

From the Sister

A guest post from my 21-year-old sister, Sarah!

When I’m bored I cook. When it snows. I cook. And this weekend, it snowed so much that I began planning feasts,dairy-free feasts, but feasts nonetheless (dairy free because of potential Crohn’s disease). And by feast I mean a snack that can be eaten morning, noon, or night.

So off I went searching and searching allrecipes.com for the perfect non-dairy Crohn’s-approved recipe. There were quite a few dairy-free recipes under the “quick breads: category. I love quick breads of any kind — banana, orange (strange and delicious), zucchini etc. What was missing though was coffee cake. Many a morning have I loomed over the coffee and danish table at work deciding which piece of coffee cake shall be devoured. But the problem with coffeecake is that there’s typically milk and sour cream in the recipe, both big no no’s obviously.

So I found it! I found the perfect Crohn’s friendly coffee cake recipe.

Ingredients: 1 (18.25 ounce) package yellow cake mix, 1 (3.4 ounce) package instant vanilla pudding mix, 1 (3.4 ounce) package instant butterscotch pudding mix, 4 eggs, 1 cup water, 1 cup vegetable oil, 1 cup packed brown sugar, 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon, 1 cup chopped walnuts
Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 9×13 inch baking pan, or a 10 inch Bundt cake pan.

In a medium bowl, stir together the cake mix, vanilla pudding mix, and butterscotch pudding mix. Add the eggs, oil and water, mix until well blended. In another bowl, stir together the brown sugar, cinnamon and nuts. Pour half of the batter into the pan, spread evenly. Sprinkle with half of the nut mixture. Cover with the rest of the batter, and sprinkle with the rest of the nut mixture.

Bake for 20 minutes in the preheated oven, then turn the oven down to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C) and bake for an additional 35 to 40 minutes.

It turned out wonderfully. But I do admit that I don’t exactly read directions that well; there are many embarrassing stories involving my calamities in the kitchen.  Firstly, I didn’t have the proper amount of pudding mix, but it didn’t particularly matter, as I could still taste it fine. Secondly, I didn’t pour the dry mixture of nuts, cinnamon, and brown sugar into half of the batter. I merely put the entirety of the batter in the pan, topped it with the mixture, baked it, and put the rest of the mixture on after.

But overall, delish.

Peanut Butter!!

I have this love affair with peanut butter.

As a little kid, I loved peanut butter sandwiches and peanut butter toast.  I don’t eat peanut butter sandwiches much now, but  I love putting peanut butter on bananas, celery and apple slices.

And obviously, I love peanut butter cookies.

I’d been craving sugar all weekend, and randomly decided to make peanut butter cookies on Sunday afternoon. I don’t make them often ( I prefer chocolate chip), and so I didn’t even have a recipe handy for them. So, I checked out allrecipes.com and found a really simple peanut butter cookie recipe.

I didn’t want to make a lot of cookies for fear that I would eat them all in rapid succession if the week was stressful and be done with them by Tuesday. So, I cut the recipe in half, which resulted in 18 cookies. I sneaked a few for dessert tonight.

Ingredients: 1 cup peanut butter (I used Jif crunchy), 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 egg

Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put all the ingredients into a bowl and blend together with mixer.  Roll dough into 1-inch balls and place on cookie sheet. Press fork into the top of the dough creating a criss-cross effect. Bake for 8-10 minutes.

News, News, News

OK, the newsy items are supposed to come on Saturday, but I was in full relaxation mode yesterday and I chose not to blog or do anything else remotely productive. Well, I did go to the bank, but that doesn’t count.

So, now that I’m recovered from this chaotic week, here’s some news from the world of food this week.

*The Australian Wine Market is suffering a bit. (Hat tip to my friend Danny — he posted this piece on Facebook) According to the article, “A combination of drought, falling exports and massive overproduction, equivalent to an estimated 360m bottles of unwanted wine, have burst the Australian bubble.” My question is, is to much wine a bad thing?

* A quick blog post from the Baltimore Sun on cooking free foods.

* Alaskan Smoked Porter Braised Short Ribs from Seattle Beer News. It was also cross posted at partner site, The Seattle Times.

* Spanish Chef Ferran Adria is closing his world renowned El Bulli restaurant to focus on discovering new food creations. “Our challenge is: can we go further? What’s the limit? That’s our work,” Adria told CNN.

* Cook your way through Spain. I’d have no problem with that. I went to Madrid the summer after freshman year of college and I loved it. I tried gazpacho for the first time and I ate a lot of bread. There was always bread and fruit in my familia’s house. This is more or less an ad for a  vacation tour. Sign me up!

* Edward Scheider of the New York Times writes about making a lasagna in Italy without the typical tomato sauce and ricotta. Instead, there is egg pasta, ragù bolognese and béchamel sauce.  Sounds good to me.

* And given that it’s Super Bowl Sunday, so I can’t not post something about football food. Here’s Mark Bittman’s post.

OK, time to get moving. I have a six mile walk calling my name, plus some grocery shopping and cooking to do. Enjoy the Super Bowl! Go Saints! (Full disclosure: I’m a Steelers fan, but I just want something nice to happen to New Orleans.)

Stresssssss

Oh blog, I’ve really been failing you this week. I’ve been neglecting you, and I’m sorry.

It’s been an insane week here that is finally winding down thankfully. I’ve had a crazy work schedule combined with some personal stresses and I got to my breaking point about yesterday midday. But luckily, things have started to calm down, and I am starting to think about how I”m going to deal with the next three months, which are my busiest out of the year for work (Legislature is in session) in terms of both stress and cooking.

BRING IT ON!

I’ve decided I want to blog every day for a couple of reasons. 1) It sort of destresses me. I don’t know why, but it does. 2) It will mean I have to keep cooking instead of relying on sandwiches or Panera for food.

And speaking of food, I finally got around to making those sweet potato chips! Thanks to Lloyd for the recipe!

I paired it with a ham steak and some veggies for dinner.  The sweet potatoes were good, but I wasn’t a fan of the ham. It was too thick for a ham steak (I bought it on sale at the store a week ago).

I didn’t eat all the ham, but just put it there for the purposes of the picture. OK, time to go. Almost time for Grey’s Anatomy!

Scoping Out Other People’s Lunch

It’s already halfway through the week! How did this happen?

I’ve had a crazy busy two days at work, going to a bunch of meetings. I worked from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. yesterday on about five hours asleep, went to the gym, made dinner and was asleep by 10:30 p.m.

Luckily, today is much more relaxed, and I’ve been able to sit at my desk quietly and work. But when I was going through my work email this morning, I discovered an email from a colleague in one of the other news bureaus in Tallahassee with a recipe for sweet potato chips!

In the Florida Capitol, the reporters work out of a big room on the third floor (our regular offices are a few blocks away), and frequently on busy days, everyone eats lunch while they work. So, you know what other people tend to eat. One person brings carrots to munch on, another friend brings a sandwich and fruit, another likes yogurt.  And one reporter, Lloyd, brings homemade sweet potato chips.

Luckily for me, Lloyd offered me a few one day and they were amazing. So, I picked up a sweet potato at the store the other day and asked him how to make them.  He initially just said some olive oil, cinnamon, salt and bake for about 25 minutes, but when I came in this morning, I found a fully written out recipe in my inbox. I think I’m going to make them tonight.

Here’s the recipe, courtesy of Lloyd:

Ingredients: Two large sweet potatoes, a liberal tablespoon of olive oil (but you can adjust depending on how you feel about the calories), two heaping teaspoons of cinnamon (I may use more than that because I like it), salt to taste (about half a teaspoon I would guess; you can also add a little pepper)

Preparation: Cut up the potatoes into slices, leaving the skins on. The thinner the slices the crisper the end product will be, but the thinnest ones cook the quickest and can burn. (I tend to cut my slices into sort of half-moon shapes, but whatever works for you is fine.)

Mix the potatoes, the oil, cinnamon and salt in a one-gallon plastic bag, making sure each slice is coated.

Place the potatoes on a baking sheet (I cover it first with foil for an easier cleanup. And depending on the size of the potatoes, you might have to cook more than one batch.)

Cooking: Preheat the oven to 450 degrees (you might have to adjust the temperature or time based on your oven; 425 may do the trick as well). Bake the potatoes for 40 minutes. I would begin checking periodically from about 25 minutes onward with closer scrutiny near the end. I pluck out the pieces or flip them if they look like they’re starting to cook too quickly. If you’re really efficient you could try flipping all the pieces at some point, although I never do that.

The potatoes should be ready after 40 minutes. But I also use what I call my desiccation process. After the 40 minutes, I turn off the oven and let some of the heat escape, but leave the potatoes in for 10 minutes or longer. I do tend to flip most of the potatoes before beginning this process to make sure none are burning on the bottom.(Also keep an eye on them because they can burn if too much heat is left in the oven.) The process dries out the potatoes and makes them more fry-like to me. If you like them moister you might not want to do this; but you can experiment with what suits your taste.

Happy February

Yikes, it’s Feb. 1! (Also my bday month — I turn 25 on Feb. 27.)

I can’t believe it’s already February — or that I’m going to be turning 25 soon — but it’s here.  I won’t lie, not much cooking going on this week, I’m planning on roasted veggies and and brown rice one night, maybe soup another night. Basically, I’m taking a cooking break and being totally unadventurous.

I had my adventure on Saturday with caving in Marianna, Fla.

But in honor of the start of the month,  here are the best recipes of January!

* Kick ass sesame chicken (My coworker jokingly threatened to break into my apartment to get the leftovers while I was in Tampa)

* Broccoli cheese soup

* Ginger Ale-Ketchup Beef Roast

* Tortellini ( I think this was my favorite)

OK, gotta go! Back to work for me!

Saturday Shorts

Hey guys, happy Saturday!

I know I’ve been a lazy poster the past few days. I’m sorry! It’s been crazy. I got home from Tampa at 10 p.m. on Thursday night, woke up Friday and had to go to a big meeting about the state budget, and then worked until 6:30ish.  This meant a night out, and my fellow young journalists and I wandered to our usual Friday spot for a nice happy hour, followed by a trip to a fun Irish bar called Finnegans, and then finally my friend Lindsay and I declared ourselves in need of some food and went to Applebees. (side note, I tried one of their new healthier options, and it was pretty good)

And now, I’ve got to make this quick because I’m going caving with some friends in a little bit.

* Eating healthy when cooking for one from Diet Blog. I struggle with this sometimes. It’s hard when you’re only cooking for one person to make things proportionately.

* Recipes that take a really, really long time to make from the Guardian.

*  High school students learn to cook and eat healthy from the Washington Post.

* The Chicago Tribune reviews a book that travels through Asia by food.

OK, gotta go get ready for this caving expedition. Have a great weekend!

On The Road Again

Greetings from Tampa!

I woke up early yesterday morning and had a nice four hour drive down I-75 from Tallahassee to Tampa so I could attend a meeting of the Florida state university system. I love traveling for work and getting out of the office in general.  But, I have this problem, I eat terribly when I travel, whether it is for work or not.

I occasionally pick up pop tarts when I’m fueling up the car (I discovered there’s  a reason adults don’t eat those on a trip back from Jacksonville a month ago — they’re so sugary that you feel ill afterward). I end up eating restaurant food.

I was pondering how to eat healthier on the road, even if it’s only an overnight trip as mine usually are.  Here’s my thoughts.

* Pack your first meal if you can. I hit the road yesterday at about 8:30, meaning I got to Tampa right around lunch time. The meeting didn’t start until 2 p.m., and I definitely needed food. So, I got out my lunch box.

Lunch = Turkey and mozzarella on 2 slices of wheat bread, a spinach-apple salad, and two clementines.

* Utilize restaurant Web sites. When I go to Tampa for work, I always go to the same place — the University of South Florida. Most of the restaurants around the campus are chains — Panera, TGI Fridays, etc.  And a lot of chains list their nutrition data with the menu. Panera (which is where I usually end up), even has a nutrition calculator, so it can add up all of your items for you. Quite handy.

* If there’s a grocery store around, check it out. A lot of grocery stores have some sort of prepared food that’s a little bit healthier. Publix has sandwiches and salads. Some places even have buffets of healthy food. And if you’re staying for more than a day, get a place with a fridge, so you can store away some food.

OK, I should get to work. Another day of meetings then hitting the road to go back to Tallahassee!

Kick Ass Sesame Chicken

I am going to sound like a little kid right now, and I am fully prepared to be mocked for it, most likely by my sister.

I made those amazing sesame chicken, and I didn’t have to call Mom once!!! (sorry for the extra exclamation marks, I was excited) New recipe #6 of 2010 was all about deliciousness. This is definitely going on the new favorites list.

I got the recipe from the Martha Stewart cooking site, and am now apparently a devotee. The sesame chicken was sweet and light, not as heavy as you’d see in many Chinese restaurants. It took a little time to prepare, but it was so worth it.

Ingredients: 3/4 cup brown rice, 3 tablespoons honey, 2 tablespoons sesame seeds, 2 tablespoons soy sauce,1 garlic clove, finely chopped or crushed with a garlic press, 2 large egg whites,1/4 cup cornstarch, 1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, cut into 2-inch chunks, 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, such as safflower, 1 1/2 pounds broccoli, cut into large florets

Directions: Place a steamer basket in a large saucepan, and fill with 1 inch water; set aside for broccoli. Cook rice according to package instructions. Meanwhile, make sauce: In a small bowl, combine honey, sesame seeds, soy sauce, and garlic; set aside. In a large bowl, whisk together egg whites and cornstarch. Add chicken; season with salt and pepper, and toss to coat.

In a large nonstick skillet, heat 1 tablespoon oil over medium-high. Add half the chicken; cook, turning occasionally, until golden and opaque throughout, 6 to 8 minutes. Transfer to a plate; repeat with remaining tablespoon oil and chicken. Return all the chicken to skillet; add reserved sauce and scallions, and toss to coat.

Meanwhile, place saucepan with steamer basket over high heat; bring water to a boil. Add broccoli, and cook until crisp-tender, 4 to 6 minutes. Serve sesame chicken with broccoli and rice.

OK, here’s what really went down: While I would like everyone to think that I followed Martha’s directions oh-so faithfully, I didn’t.

First of all, I have this inability to make rice. I’ve tried, but I always screw it up. I either burn it or don’t cook it long enough. I don’t know why I can’t make rice, but I just can’t. So, 90 second rice in the micro it was.

I also didn’t quite steam the broccoli like Martha suggested. That was because I didn’t buy fresh broccoli. I had a bag of frozen broccoli florets in the freezer. So, out came the pot and water to cook the broccoli.

And I keep bags of frozen chicken breasts on hand, so I took out two pieces (one was huge and one was really small), let them thaw, and then cut them up. So no, I didn’t use fresh chicken breasts.  Oh, and I definitely didn’t use safflower, but some generic Winn Dixie oil. What can I say? Girl on a budget, here.

And in the end, it all worked out. I have a lot left over too, so I can eat it later this week.

OK, that’s all for me! I have to go pack for a biz trip to Tampa tomorrow.  Hasta mañana!