My Time Trying Thai

Recipes on deck for tomorrow night - Thai coconut shrimp soup with spinach and Pad Thai (Mark Bittman). I am finding myself very fond of Mark Bittman's recipes.  He is able to make so many recipes accessible and non-intimidating to home cooks.  I would love a few pictures in his cookbooks but that really is my only negative feedback.  Hopefully I will remember to take some pictures. 

Pizza - mushroom, spinach, bacon, sundried tomato

Ok, today I spent the majority of the day preparing the ingredients for what was supposed to be an awesome-to-die-for pizza.  It was okay but not at all worth the amount of effort that was put into it.  It started at 10 o'clock a.m. - I put together the mostly whole wheat pizza crust recipe from Mark Bittman's Food Matters cookbook.  Next I needed to roast some garlic and precook the bacon.  I also sauteed mushrooms and had to reconstitute the dried tomatoes.  I made a version of Emeril Lagasse's white sauce for pizza minus the cayenne pepper adding the roasted garlic to the sauce.  The sauce seemed a little bland and the pizza dough should have been much thinner. I will try a different version!

The salad was a mixed greens salad with defrosted blueberries, granny smith apples, crumbled bacon, feta cheese with a blueberry dressing found at this website.  I also made Cinnamon Roasted Almonds to put on the salad and these were the best thing I made today. 

I also decided to cook a pot of brown rice to use for the rest of the week. 

Tomorrow I am planning on making Thai food and hope that it was worth the cost of the condiments.

Smoothie Fail

I thought I would try my hand at a very healthy smoothie today.

Recipe, although it does not and probably should not deserve a repeat unless to tweak it.

1 peeled beet, raw
2 apples
1 navel orange
2 blood oranges
1 inch cube peeled ginger
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup ice
2 tablespoons honey

The color is beautiful however when I drank this I noticed that it tasted somewhat like dirt and burned my throat. I chalked it up to me getting a cold but my almost 2 year old slowly sipped it and said "not liking the smoothie. Need a new smoothie." I knew that I wasn't alone in being terribly let down at the flavor.

I am not giving up on adding veggies to my smoothies but will perhaps follow a few recipes for guidance, it couldn't hurt.

Kicked up scrambled eggs

After receiving a generous amount of onions in my Bountiful Basket this week, I decided to try my hand at adding caramelized onions to scrambled eggs.  I always like to have extra veggies in my food, it is an easy way to sneak in nutrition and bulk up a dish. 

Olive oil
3 onions - sliced into thin half rings
1 bunch Swiss chard greens
Ham chunks
Swiss and Gruyere cheese
8 eggs
1/4 cup whole milk
Salt and Pepper
1 teaspoon herbs De Provence

I added a couple of turns of olive oil around the pan then added my sliced onions and allowed them to cook for 15 minutes or so until they were nicely caramelized.  I added about 1 1/2 cups cleaned chopped Swiss chard and 1/2 cup of ham chunks and cooked this until the chard became wilted.  I removed this from my pan and then added back 8 eggs scrambled with the whole milk and cooked slowly over low heat until almost set.  At this point I added back the other mixture and added the salt, pepper and herbs De Provence then sprinkled to top with cheese and set it in my oven which was preheated to 350 degrees.  I left in the oven until the cheese was completely melted.


Great addition to our Sunday brunch! 

Turkey Sausage, Potato and Kale Soup

Sourdough grilled bread

Mark Bittman's recipe from How To Cook Everything. Pg 227.


Sourdough Starter
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/8 tsp. instant yeast
1 cup warm water

Stir together. Cover loosely, and let stand at room temperature. Stir every 8 to 12 hours. The mixture will become bubbly and eventually develop a sour smell. If your kitchen is warm, this may happen in 24 hours; usually it takes a couple of days.

To maintain the starter, add about 3/4 cup of flour and 1/2 cup of water to the remainder and stir well. Cover and refrigerate. [I usually leave it at room temperature until it bubbles, so I'm certain that it's still "alive."] Use within a week or add a little more flour and water to keep it going. If you always take half the starter and rejuvenate it this way, it will last forever.

I baked this on the Traeger grill. I preheated it in high with the pizza stone on the grill. To have steam, I added a pot of boiling water to the grill top. I used a pizza peel lined with parchment to transfer it to the stone and removed it after 5 minutes. I turned the heat down to 350 and cooked until the internal temperature was 190.

Homemade gyros

I decided to finally try my hand at making homemade pita bread. Once again, my King Arthur flour cookbook came to my rescue with a fantastic whole wheat recipe.


The pitas are delicious on their own. It will be hard to eat store bought pita bread again ever! 
We were initially going to have steak and salad for dinner but only had two small steaks which was not going to feed all of us. I thought pitas + steak = a gyro (sort of). We had a bunch of Greek yogurt, cucumbers and garlic so that made the perfect accompaniment along with my grilled onions and red peppers.



Allow dough to rise until doubled in bulk. http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/organic-wheat-pita-with-fruit-salsa-recipe - click for recipe for the pita dough



Roll out to 6" diameter

Bake on stone until it balloons, appx 3-4 min. then turn over and cook for 2-3 more minutes



http://greek.food.com/recipe/tzatziki-59336 - for recipe



Caramelized onions and peppers.

Grilled New York steaks.