Irish Apple Cake

OMG you have to make this, it's probably even better as written with dairy.  But because I can't have any dairy, we made a dairy free version, and let me tell you, the four of us all had at least 2 slices.

I got the recipe for the Irish Apple Cake from my friend's blog, she featured it as one of her Friday Fancies, it looked intriguing so I clicked on the recipe and wanted to make it, but didn't have a when or for what.  Fast forward to Friday morning after brunch, C, his roommate M, his girlfriend E, and I had brunch at True Food (juice was good, food and service need some work) and discussed dinner.  M had a salmon in the freezer to cook, so we ended up offering to make dessert, and voila, we had an occasion to make the cake.

To make it dairy free we used soy milk instead of all the milk, and Earth Balance instead of butter.   The only thing I added was some cinnamon, about 1 tsp, and doubled the rest of the spices because C likes spices.  Have to be careful letting him add spices or it will triple!  Everything else was the same for the cake and into the oven it went to cook while we enjoyed the salmon.  We could smell it as it finished, so delicious!  To make the custard with soy milk I ended up adding 1 tsp of cornstarch at the end step to help thicken it as I think cows milk has a thickening component to it that soy milk doesn't.

We served large slices, covered with custard sauce and each one of us demolished our slice.  It had the right amount of sugar and spice, wasn't too sweet, and the apples were warm and soft and melted in your mouth.  Heaven on a plate (and that phrase is normally reserved for chocolate for me).

Hope you get a chance to make this for St. Patrick's Day, it's a great representation of true Irish food!

Sweet Potato & Lentil Curry (in two takes)

When Mom & Dad were in town a few weekends ago, C & I decided to make dinner on Friday night, using the recipe for Sweet Potato & Lentil Curry posted on my friend Meghan' blog.  I've loved every recipe Meghan has posted, you should check out her ever expanding menu of recipes!

This recipe evolved for us over two tries.  We had all the ingredients (I'm not going to write out the recipe, you have to go visit Meghan's blog!) and were ready to go, and then got to talking and the stove was too hot, and before we knew it, Dad mentioned that something smelled like it was burning, and low and behold we stirred and the bottom of the pot was black.  Everything tasted like a campfire.  Down the disposal it went and I scrounged around the kitchen to see what we had and whether we could make round 2, or had to go out to eat.

I found a butternut squash to use instead of the sweet potatoes, crushed tomatoes instead of diced, and luckily we had a second bag of red lentils!  Pot 2 was very successful.  So despite eating at 9pm and not being very hungry due to snacks while cooking, it was delicious!

As I can't have yogurt, being dairy-free, C found some plain soy yogurt at Whole Foods that worked well on the curry.  Everything else was dairy-free, making it pretty easy for me.

It was even better the next day after the flavors had time to combine.

Easy Peanut Chicken

I have a subscription to Cooking Light and I love it when I find a recipe that is dairy/shellfish/mango-free and doesn't need any adaptation!

Found this recipe for Chicken Stir-fry in Peanut Sauce in the November 2014 issue, but it's also online (should be the first one in the display, otherwise you can search for it by name).

Quick and easy to prepare, start the Coconut-Cilantro rice early as it needed more than 17 minutes for me.  I also halved the chili (siracha) and added another spoonful of peanut butter because that makes everything awesome.

Recipe Recap:
I sliced a chicken breast in strips, heated oil in pan, cooked the chicken pretty much all the way through, then removed.  Zapped the broccoli for a minute, then added the broccoli and red pepper to the pan, cooked for about 5 minutes then added the chicken and sauce.  Serve over the rice.

Delicious!

Charm City Weekend

Last weekend we headed up to Charm City to visit a friend and had a quick tour, so busy and fun that I didn't take photos.  Plus it was cold so that detracts from wanting to take my hands out of my pockets or gloves (or both!).  Quick recap:

Drove up for lunch on Saturday, she lives in the Mount Vernon neighborhood so we got a great tour.  Started with awesome falafel at Shapiro's Cafe, an unmarked door on the street (but there are signs on the window, just not on the door), where everything (including the heat) seems to go wrong but the food makes up for it!

Then drove over to Fells Point.  When we lived in Baltimore (late 1990s), Fells Point and Little Italy was not a place you go for a day, my parents report it was a place that you go to get the best Italian food, but leave by 9pm.  So much has changed!  Such a cute area along the waterfront!  Grabbed coffee at the Daily Grind, walked around before settling on a pint at the Admiral's Cup, who played awesome 80s Pop.  Chris was in heaven!  Around 5 we headed back to Mt. Vernon for dinner at City Cafe.  They were awesome with my allergies, the server went back to talk to the chef and they had several options they could modify for me.  Settled on the duck confit with a white bean and sausage - delicious!

We then headed to 13th Floor, which is on the 13th floor of the Belvedere Building, great views of the city and jazz trio playing.  Service was a bit slow and the Cucumber Collins was too strong and too sweet, especially for the price.  After a drink we headed downstairs to Owl Bar, a totally different, but really neat atmosphere that has great Moscow Mules.  Story has it they were a speakeasy during Prohibition and if the owl was blinking then all was ok and there were no feds around.  Their pizza looked delicious and we enjoyed a round (or two) before calling it a night.  (Mom and Dad remembered 13 fondly, less memory of Owl Bar as they only went once.)

Woke up to snow/sleet combo the next morning so we walked (carefully! like a penguin!) over to brunch at XS on Charles St.  They were also great with my allergies, but had run out of soy milk that morning for coffee.  Had the Southwestern Omelet, just for the avocado, which was great, but was over stuffed with chicken.  Really neat atmosphere and they were even willing to turn down the fans when it got a bit cold!

Drove back south in the snow/sleet/rain mess, timing it right so there were not many accidents on the road.  All in all a good trip to Baltimore (just hoping for warmer weather next time!)

Some food lessons learned

It always seems like recipes and food blogs are written for those with lots of cooking experience who can whip out a recipe in the blink of an eye and don't question or run into problems when the ingredients they find are not exactly as the recipe called for.  Case in point, the frozen salmon I bought.  I know that fresh is always better, but didn't have time to run to two stores that day, and my usual grocery store doesn't have a great fresh fish selection.

Directions on the bag of frozen salmon say cook from frozen, doesn't say anything about flipping the fish either.  We tried that...miserable failure.  The edges were over cooked, the inside still raw.  Lesson learned, defrost your fish before cooking.

Try #2, I defrosted the salmon, patted it dry, and looked up "salmon bake rules" to figure out what temp and how long to cook it.  Every site says a different thing, but the one I found said 350 and 10 minutes per inch thick.  This fish was about 1.5 inches thick so, I flipped it from skin down to skin up at 10 mins, the smaller piece came out done at 15 minutes, the larger piece was done at 20.  That worked!  But then the fish, while cooked, was soggy.  Lesson #2: really dry that defrosted fish before baking.

Third lesson, eat any left over fish the next day, probably for lunch the next day.  Fish for lunch 2 days later, not so good.

My friend Meghan is blogging, mostly about food but also some life experiences, and she posted a great Ginger Tilapia recipe (has a Wok this Way feature as she's soon to be a Wang (pronounced Wong, Vera is wrong) and is learning to cook some Chinese/Taiwanese meals from her future-mother-in-law) that we made, and while I screwed up the portion size (no wonder we were still hungry) it was delicious and I learned some great lessons from her post:

1) really dry the fish then sprinkle with salt and pepper (why I didn't apply this to the salmon on round 2, I don't know)
2) put the biggest piece in the pan first, ending with the smallest as the biggest needs to cook longer
3) to check if it's done, poke the largest part with a chopstick.  If it comes out clean, it's done!  Did this with the salmon too, and it worked!

We also tried her crock pot Chicken Mole recipe and it was delicious as well, even at 11pm when we sat down for dinner.  (Let's just say that multi-tasking is difficult for people and remember to start crockpots earlier than expected...).  It's dairy free too!  We had it as tacos first, which were good, but I liked it better over rice to help scoop up the sauce.

(Pictures will have to be added later as the Photo Stream from my iphone to my PC doesn't sync, and my old mac laptop is struggling.)

It's been really neat following Meghan's blog and learning how much time it takes to create and curate a well-done blog, especially to gain followers.  This little blog of mine has no big aspirations and is really for me to look back on later to see what I cooked and did, but her's is beautiful with regular posts, great photography and I hope it goes places and takes her places with it!   I love that her blog has these tips that help me, a newbie at cooking fish and veggies (and almost everything, I'm learning more as I go about how much I don't know).

Following recipes. A resolution.

I need to learn how to follow recipes better to become a better cook before I decide to wing it.  I'm decent at technique, but by not following recipes, things don't always turn out like expected.  Case in point, our New Years Eve dinner.  I wanted to make a nice beef and stout stew, so it would be hearty enough to handle a night out with friends.  I tried to combine a couple different recipes, which of course now I know doesn't usually work out well.  I can't really cook on the fly...yet.

Here's what I did (and what not to do):

1 lb boneless chuck cubed

1 T butter (I used EarthBalance due to my dairy allergy)

3 large carrots, evenly chopped

10 small fingerling potatoes, cut in half

2 medium onions, quartered

3 large celery stalks, chopped

1 1/3 c. Beef broth

1 1/3 c stout (I grabbed a large bottle of Guinness)

2 pieces of old bread

2 T flour

Spices

Sprinkle beef with salt and pepper, melt butter at high heat and brown beef in a frying pan for 5 minutes. Move beef to the crock pot.  Melt more butter and caramelize onions and celery, dump into crock pot and turn on high for 6 hours.  Add potatoes and carrots to crock pot.  In the frying pan, melt a bit more butter, then add flour and cook into a roux of sorts, scrapping up all the bits left in the pan from the meat.  Then add some broth, about 1/2 c, bubble and then pour into the crock pot.  Pour the rest of the broth and stout in and add spices.  I used thyme, rosemary, parsley and salt and pepper, probably a teaspoon of the first three.  (Again, I need to work on measuring things.). As I had extra broth in the can, and extra stout, I just poured those in as well.  Cook for four hours, then rip up the bread in small pieces and add those, put the lid back on.  That was it.  

The biggest problem was that it was bitter.  I overlooked the part that most recipes called for a little bit of sugar, and once we added some to our bowls it was better, but there was something still not quite right.  However it did smell delicious!

With drop biscuits and some broccolini on the side, we survived!  Happy New Years and on to the next recipe that I will actually try to follow. :)

Moroccan Tagine

I found this recipe for a Moroccan Chicken Tagine in one of my Cooking Light Magazines and it was a hit, the second time I made it.

Ingredients

• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground red pepper
• 2 1/2 cups chopped skinless, boneless chicken breast
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 cup (1/2-inch) cubed peeled butternut squash

• 1/2 cup fat-free, lower-sodium chicken broth
• 1 (15-ounce) can no-salt-added chickpeas, drained
• 1 (14.5-ounce) can diced tomatoes
• 1 1/2 cups boiling water
• 1 cup uncooked couscous
• 1/4 cup toasted sliced almonds
• 1 teaspoon grated orange rind

Preparation

Combine salt, cumin, cinnamon, ginger, and red pepper. Sprinkle mixture over chicken. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add olive oil. Sauté chicken 4 minutes. Stir in butternut squash, chicken broth, chickpeas, and tomatoes; bring to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer 5 minutes or until squash is tender. Combine boiling water and couscous. Cover; let stand 5 minutes. Stir in almonds and orange rind.

After the first try I learned that butternut squash doesn't cook in 5 minutes...more like 12-15 at least on my stove, so my solution was to microwave it for 2-3 minutes before adding it to the pan. I also doubled the spices as I seem to like things more flavorful than magazines make them.  For fall flavors, I used cauliflower, butternut squash and carrots, omitting the tomatoes, and it was just as good.  Quick and easy weeknight meal that makes plenty of left-overs for lunches during the week!

Fall 2014 Food: Huevos Rancheros, Shepherd's Pie, Baked Flounder

It's been a while since the last post (6 mo to be exact), but here's a brief record of what we've been cooking and eating during this extra busy fall.

There's no picture that I know of, but for brunch with my family after my birthday celebration, we made some delicious Huevos Rancheros in Tortilla cups following this lovely recipe from Epicurious.  To make them dairy free for me, we used Daiya cheese on some of the cups instead of Monterrey Jack, and as my family is not known for their spice tolerance, we limited the use of the Chipotle Hot Sauce.  My family still raves about them, so it was a success!

Then there was a delicious Shepherd's Pie that I made for Chris's birthday dinner, as he said it was one of his favorite meals.  I tried to find ground lamb, but after two grocery stores and no luck, I grabbed some ground beef, and luckily it was still delicious.  I also forgot to add the peas before it went into the oven, but luckily you can microwave them, and mix them in when serving.  Almost as good.  

To make it dairy free, I subbed Earth Balance for the butter (best dairy-free butter sub out there in my opinion), and Almond Milk for the regular milk.  I personally don't think you could tell a difference in the mashed potato topping, but I did have to add more Almond Milk and Earth Balance than called for to get the creamy mashed potatoes I wanted.  My mom sometimes uses some chicken broth in with the "milk" to help with a creaminess.  

My proof that they were good?  Chris's roommate put his frozen meal back in the freezer to eat with us, and all three of us got second helpings!

Over the holidays we discovered that our customary Pepperidge Farm Stuffing mix now includes dairy so we made our own this year, but I found that some of the Stovetop brand stuffing mixes are dairy-free, so there's still a quick option out there!

Some good allergy news arrived after Thanksgiving when we found out that my life-threatening shellfish and mango allergies are not life-threatening after all.  I have oral allergy syndrome for those, so I get all the swelling, itching, and tingling in my mouth and tongue, but it won't progress to anaphylaxis.  That was a huge anxiety relief, because while it's annoying to have those symptoms, and I still have to avoid those foods, I don't feel like I'm going to possibly die every time we go out to eat.  However, because most restaurants (and let's face it, most people) don't understand the difference, I'm still going to use "Severe Allergy" at restaurants to avoid cross contamination and contact so I'm not having to take a Benedryl and thus a nap with every meal.

After visiting Ohio to see Chris's family, his parents gave us a bag of frozen flounder fillets that they had accidentally bought, so we had to find a flounder recipe!  Thus we made Baked Flounder Fillets in Lemon-Soy Vinaigrette the other night, following the directions to a doubled-T, plus some lemon zest.

 The verdict?  They were ok, definitely mild in the flavor category.  Lesson learned, read the reviews of the recipes before choosing.  Next time I would add more garlic, pepper and lemon, and maybe some ginger, cut back on the salt.  One reviewer even said to cook in a foil packet, so maybe that would help add more flavor, or even marinate the fish.  Not our best meal.

Lastly, for tonight before we head out with friends, I have a beef & stout stew going in the crock pot...more on that later!  Happy New Years!

Mayan Dark Chocolate Pie

For our annual beach family pie competition, I found this recipe for a dark chocolate pudding pie from http://www.godairyfree.org/recipes/mayan-dark-chocolate-pie, made it and it was a success!

I bought a graham cracker crust and used the pudding recipe below:

Pie Filling:

• 2 cups vanilla coconut milk beverage (such as So Delicious Dairy Free Vanilla) - couldn't find straight coconut milk beverage so I used the almond-coconut drink that I found
• 1 cup cocoa powder
• ½ cup agave nectar (can sub maple syrup, if preferred - I used maple syrup as it was easier to find in a small beach grocery store)
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract
• ⅛ to ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper (for some noticeable heat, use the full ¼ teaspoon)
• 5 tablespoons cornstarch
• ⅓ cup cold water

To Make the Pie Filling:

1. Combine the coconut milk beverage, cocoa, sweetener, and vanilla in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir constantly until the cocoa is dissolved and the mixture comes to a slow boil. (This can take a while, I ended up turning up the heat after a while which helped, ugh electric stoves)
2. Add the cayenne and stir thoroughly. (I didn't have cayenne so I added a shot of rum for flavor)
3. In a small bowl, whisk the cornstarch in the cold water until dissolved. Briskly whisk the mixture into your saucepan.
4. Turn the heat down to low and continue to cook, while whisking for 2 to 3 minutes, or until the pudding becomes thick and heavy.
5. Pour the pudding into your prepared pie crust, smoothing it out as needed.
6. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the top of the pie becomes dark and crater like.
7. Allow the pie to cool off for an hour or two before serving with dairy-free ice cream or fresh fruit, if desired.

For the rest of the pie, I put a thin layer of marshmallow fluff on top, and then lots of sliced strawberries.  The marshmallow didn't add a ton of flavor, and I really just wanted it to help the strawberries stick on top.  The pudding consistency was great, but the flavor was a bit bitter (didn't fit the judges - the young cousins), so next time I would add more sweetener.  It would also be good with a layer of peanut butter and oreo crumble on top, or just some dairy-free ice cream on top.

APSI Reflection- #SummerLS Challenge 4

It's the last day of our summer AP Institute, learning about the changes for APUSH that we need to take into account for next year.  It's been an exhausting week and we're all ready to be done, especially those of us in FCPS as this extended our already long school year by an extra 4 days.  We're also sitting in a classroom on a Saturday from 8-5, and we'll be here until 5.  No getting out at 4:30 like we all hope!

I'm also blogging this for the #SummerLS or summer learning series that is taking place through the twitter hashtag.  If any fellow educators want to join in, look up Todd Nesloney on twitter and ask to join!

The changes for APUSH seem to be good.  The biggest thing is the change in the DBQ and what students need to do with the documents within the essay.  Rather than just using an analysis of 55% of the documents as in the past, students now need to use ALL of the documents (or at least all minus one) and either discuss the historical context, intended audience, purpose or point of view for each document.  The rubric is going to change, but join the APUSH facebook group or the #APUSH chat on twitter and you should find some resources.  There's also apparently lots on the Teacher Community on AP Central.  So big change for this year is going to be paring down how much lecture we do, to add more time analyzing documents in class and discussing them.

Another big change to the test are the short answer questions.  Students have to answer all of these, and the focus is on answering the prompt, either based on a picture (so a question would be "discuss the point of view of the artist in regards to (historical context)"), a text excerpt, or no stimulus.  2-3 sentences shouldn't be a problem, the real issue in teaching them how to write these is that they're not mini essays.  Maybe start these as warm-ups on index cards to limit their space.

Instead of 2 FRQs, students now write one long essay (the new name) that also mentions historical thinking skills, so we're going to have to specifically name and teach those with our kids so they understand what the questions are asking.

There's definitely going to be some changes in the classroom, but it will be good changes going into more depth with the kids.