Smoked Sausage!

ALRIGHT. SO I used to eat smoked sausage quite a bit in my youth. My mom especially loved to eat a fried split link for breakfast with her eggs and toast.

I really like how it crisps up just right when you cook it in a pan, but it's also very flavorful and gives a lot of flavor to whatever you cook with and eat with it.

The most recent foods I've made with delicious smoked sausage: Spaghetti, and tomato soup!

The spaghetti was easy, just cut your sausage into pieces however large you desire. I like mine cut into coins. Cook your sausage in a skillet. You don't need to add oil or fat because the sausage is full of it! The meat will actually shrink and release a lot of delicious grease!! YUMMM....right? :\ It's all for the good!

I also chopped up some mushrooms and onion and cooked those along with the sausage in the skillet. After they had browned, add your favorite sauce and it's done! Be sure to have a small taste to know if you need to add any S&P.

TOMATO SOUP: When making tomato soup, many a times it will end up tasting like a ragu instead of a proper soup. Regardless, it will be tasty. For this recipe, I used a 30oz can of diced tomatoes.

I started again with the sausage coins in a medium pot. After cooking them, remove them! Add your tomato, onion, garlic, and a ton of basil. A metric TON. Just kidding, only a medium handful of dried basil.

I don't know about the rest of you out there in internet-world. I own an immersion blender! If you own one too, you can make your soup mildly chunky by pureeing loosely here and there. Having a chunky soup isn't a bad thing though, if you want to keep it chunky (or don't have an immersion blender). Add your meats back to the mix and serve! I enjoy having a small splash of cream on top, it's an aesthetic thing.

If you don't want any meat, don't add any and make it vegetarian, I'm not holding you back! Be aware that the meat is pretty salty, so you don't necessarily need to add any more, but some fresh black pepper won't hurt.

So... meat?

I've started eating meat as of last October, I recently have made some tasty foods and I'll be talking about them... Later! :D

One Can: Dinner and Dessert

So I had a craving for some kind of fall-esque baked good.

What's as fall-esque apart from pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread...pumpkin stuff?! Nothing! I like my mom's chocolate pumpkin muffins, and that's what I decided to make.

I found a recipe online for easy muffins. I had a big 30 oz can of pureed pumpkin and the rest is history!

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup canned solid-pack pumpkin (from a 15 ounce can)
1/3 cup vegetable oil*
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pumpkin-pie spice
1 1/4 cups plus 1 tablespoon sugar**
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Put oven in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F. Put liners in muffin cups.
Whisk together pumpkin, oil, eggs, pumpkin pie spice, 1 1/4 cups sugar, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl until smooth, then whisk in flour mixture until just combined.
Stir together cinnamon and remaining 1 tablespoon sugar in another bowl.
Divide batter among muffin cups (each should be about three-fourths full), then sprinkle tops with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Bake until puffed and golden brown and wooden pick or skewer inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes.
Cool in pan on a rack five minutes, then transfer muffins from pan to rack and cool to warm or room temperature.


I used 1 cup of brown sugar instead of all white sugar. I figured it would retain moisture and they totally did! Adding chocolate and big grains of sugar on the top always please!

An om nom nom experience indeed.

They are a little dense, but moist, like a real bread, but softer? Maybe!? As usual, I took them out early because  don't like bone dry muffins and I timed it perfectly. If they would have stayed in longer by another 5-10 minutes, the outer crust on the bottom would have gotten too rough. The insides were JUST done. There wasn't a lot of lift (air bubbles in the dough), so like I mentioned, these are very dense.

What can be done with 15 oz of leftover pumpkin puree? A soup!

I browned a tbsp of butter in a soup pan, added minced 1/2 onion and 2 garlic cloves. Poured about a cup of veggie stock, the pumpkin puree.

Dashes of:
Turmeric
Coriander
Ginger
S&P
Rice vinegar
and once more, about 1/3 cup brown sugar!

Once you have all the ingredients in, reduce until napee (that's a french cooking term, meaning that it can coat a spoon when warm)

And one can of regular coconut milk. Rich and delicious, if you are wanting a savory soup, try losing the sugar, and adding more onion and garlic. Try adding roasted carrots and pureeing the whole shebang with an immersion blender.

I love eating soup with healthy toast!

Grape leaves are SO EASY.

A couple nights ago I had gone shopping and I found some pickled grape leaves at the super store in the ethnic food section. My intentions were to create some! There's this very decent restaurant in downtown GR that sells sandwiches and platters for reasonable prices and you get your bang for your buck. They kind of inspired me to make stuffed grape leaves myself.

The recipe is simple, it is the process that is tedious and sometimes even vexing. If you're using pickled leaves, it was suggested (in the recipe I found online) to rinse my leaves, then pour boiling water over them to let them sit for 10 minutes at least. After doing so, the rest of the process is similar to making burritos...with leaves. Easy right?

The stuffing as you can see in the amazing picture, was UNCOOKED basmati rice, herbs and aromatics. Regular and green onions, parsley, mint, a small drop of sambal pepper paste (the recipe called for 1/4 chili pepper but had none on hand). Then one cup of rice, S&P, a little bit of oil and voila! The stuffing has been made!

It calls for a relatively large saucepan to simmer the bundles in. Having rolled them to resemble cigars, (the hardest part really) the online recipe also stated that you should line the pan with excess leaves. A barrier to separate the heat I am thinking, don't want to scorch anything. They are then drizzled with more olive oil, and then just topped off with boiling water and set to simmer for 45 minutes. Be sure to press them down with a plate or blanketed weight of some kind.

The flavors are very subtle, and they need to cool down a bit for sure before you can consume them. the next time I make them, I will add more salt and pepper than I thought would be necessary, and maybe some tofu crumbles. Perhaps browning the onion before mixing it into the stuffing. Tomato? Bread crumbs? Olives?! So many possibilities. So good!

 

Enjoy!

P.s. the reheat-re-eat value is pretty decent as well, warm is better than piping hot though! The rice may be a little chewier than when fresh, but if you add more water during the cooking process, that might be a variable. And they make great additions to things like soups, curries, etc. Go wild!

Boil 'em, mash 'em, put 'em in a stew.

POTATOES.

They are delicious and mildly nutritious. Actually, they aren't that nutritious at all! The potato famine, as I once thought, was not about a lack of potatoes. The potato famine happened because ALL the peoples had to eat WAS potatoes. And not surprisingly, that = death.

BUT, today we're just eating some potatoes, not for months on end.

Roasted potato fries!

It's actually pretty simple.

1. Turn your oven on to about 400-425 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Cut your potatoes in wedges.

3. Create your seasoning! I like to do different spice combinations. Most of the time though, it's salt, pepper, garlic powder, and perhaps a curry paste. All of that mixed in some veggie oil and then slathered all over the wedges. My mom would use a packet of onion soup mix (Which is what I have done today...sort of).

4. Into the oven for....30-45-50 minutes dependin on how crispy you want them to be (also be sure to turn them over if you prefer two-sided crispiness).

5. Consume the crap out of them.

Hey, don't take my word for it. Take their word for it.

If you readers out there are SUPER INTERESTED in what you eat, I stumbled across this nifty website. Check it out ya'll.

http://nutritiondata.self.com/

You can find most foods and ascertain their worthiness in your belly!

Mmmm protein.

Today I worked until 5:30pm. I got home at around 5:35ishpm. Dinner is done and I'm sitting down to eat and write this entry at 6:02pm. This is an easy-peasy concoction. (It also helps that my room mate made some quinoa yesterday.) :D

This is a SUPER -Vegetarian dish. I only chose to use butter (because butter tastes better), you can skip that dairy and it'll become 100% vegan. Woooo.

So, what I had in my fridge today was a lime, half of a red bell pepper, 1 lb of firm tofu, Sriracha sauce (or Rooster sauce),  some broccoli, and some pre-cooked quinoa. In my pantry I had some peanut butter, and some 'liquid aminos' a.k.a. soy sauce.

1. Saute bell pepper and broccoli wi' da budda.

2. Cube up the tofu to desired bite-size pieces.

3. Combine about 1-2 tbsp of the peanut butter with the hot sauce according to your tastes and then add about a relatively large splash of the aminos. Stir together until it gets mixed thoroughly.

4. Add the tofu to the pan along with the sauce.

5. Add your quinoa to the pan, or reheat it and put however much you have/want into your bowl.

6. Top quinoa with tasty food, garnish with some lime juice (it's gooood).

Tofu is a complete protein made out of coagulated soy bean protein. The varying densities (that you can buy at the sto') refer to how much water is pressed out before consuming.

Quinoa is an ancient grain that's coming back to the lime-light. It looks a little weird when it's cooked because of the curly-doobies, but it's pretty much delicious in any kind of application. You can replace rice with quinoa in any meal. There are lots of fun things you can do with it. IT'S ALSO A GREAT SOURCE OF PROTEIN.

Ta da! ::om nom nom::