Baked eggs with kale, tomatoes, and feta

I used to make this all the time, and I don't know why I got out of the habit. It's pretty simple, and if you have an hour or so to devote to breakfast (or about fifteen minutes if you saute everything and fry the eggs on the stove) then you should try it. I made this for breakfast on Sunday and I think it was a hit.

Just before putting the skillet in the stove.

The finished product. Delicioso.

If I were the kind of girl who kept Bloody Mary supplies on hand (and I really should be, given that it is my third-favorite drink, after only the Old-Fashioned and Margarita) I could see this as the perfect accompaniment to a nice and spicy one.  

Energy Bars

I wanted to make something that I could pack up and send with Jana as she travels back to the Midwest. Airport food is dodgy at best and it's always nice to have something in your bag just in case you get stuck somewhere where food options are limited. I'm hoping the energy bars I made were a good addition to her carry-on.

The base recipe comes from theKitchn's 3-Ingredient Energy Bars. This recipe was super simple and super tasty. I ended up using roasted almonds, dried cranberries, a handful of coconut flakes, some orange zest, and dates.

Feast, Jana's visit edition

My friend Jana visited for a few days from Michigan and it was so good to see her. Jana is the kind of friend who keeps you from too much crippling self-doubt about the progress you're making on your life. My requirements for friendship vary by person, because each of my friends has different qualities for me to admire and draw upon. This means that--like with most people, I suspect--none of my friendships exhibit exactly the same characteristics. In the aggregate, my friends keep me sane, grounded, focused, goofy, loved, connected, humble, social, and/or creative.

As a current friend and former coworker and roommate, Jana does many of these things, but what she really does is she keeps me afloat. When I begin to wander into a hyperbolic fit of melodrama over the state of my career/love life/education/future, she reels me back in before I fall too far down the rabbit hole. I hate giving her back to her husband and cat, but I suppose I couldn't keep her forever. They deserve to have her in their lives at least as much as I (this is me, being a good, unselfish, self-sacrificing friend :P).

While she visited, I made:

Homemade Nutella and cajeta (goat's milk caramel sauce)

Baked eggs with kale and tomatoes

Lemon blueberry donuts

Tofu stir-fry with asparagus and carrots

Coconut-almond-date-cranberry energy bars

Avocado on toast (Forage)

I love avocados. Now that we're importing them from Mexico, they're so much more abundant and slightly more affordable (thanks, NAFTA?). When I want a fancy looking breakfast for myself, but I don't want to dirty any pots and pans, I smash up an avocado with some lemon or lime juice and slather it on toast with a little salt and pepper. The hit of acid from the citrus is critical because it contrasts really nicely with the richness of the avocado.

Spinach, mushroom, and goat cheese scramble

One of the best things to come out of grad school has been the fact that my brother also goes to the same university. Very very different graduate programs, but we still get to see each other a lot.

My brother is five years younger than me and we are almost polar opposites. We share a common core though, one that values family, loyalty, and trust above most everything else. Ha, "Family, Loyalty, Trust" . . . that makes it sound like we're a family on Game of Thrones . . . I wonder what our sigil would be? . . . wastes half an hour looking at Game of Thrones house sigils and [spoilers?] wishing Jason Momoa had played someone with a longer life span on the TV show. What was I saying? Oh, yes, it's been so great to be able to spend a lot of time with my baby bro and realize how glad I am that we're friends. 

Anyway, sentiment aside, another benefit to having him nearby is that he's available to grab a meal with me pretty frequently. I like to cook, but it's a bummer to have lots of leftovers. A 23-year-old brother takes care of that handily! Example: this past weekend, I had him over for brunch and we had no leftovers, even though I made a six-egg scramble and two giant breakfast sausages.

I intended to make omelettes, but I forgot to add oil to the pan and my beautifully-set omelette turned into a messy, delicious scramble.

Rookie mistake! ROOKIE MISTAKE! Always oil the pan!

Le sigh. Someday, perfect-looking food. Some. Day.

My completely captivated audience

. . . Is basically my dog, Buster. He is a mutt--half Basenji/half Chihuahua--and is the cutest thing ever. He's the size of an overweight housecat and he can do a five-foot vertical jump from a standing position. Buster's most unnerving habit is the staring he does whenever someone other than him is eating. I mean, I love undivided attention as much as the next Leo, but this? This is intense.

I do a lot of my prep work and eating at the breakfast bar, which looks out into the living room (and, most importantly, the TV). This gives my dog ringside seats to most of my cooking prep and dining. If I'm at the bar, this is usually my view:

Hey, lady. It's cool. Notice me or don't. I don't care.

Seriously, though. Are you gonna eat ALL of that?
I mean, I'm not judging, but maybe you could hook a brotha up.

Hey. Hey. Hey. Lady.

You. Will. Rue. This. Day. You will come home one day and your bed will be seriously disordered and
I WON'T EVEN PRETEND TO BE REMORSEFUL. No one puts Buster in the corner.

Atyya's brownie tart

I love making desserts more than anything, so it's funny that my first few posts haven't featured any of my own recipes. That will be corrected soon, I promise. For now, take a look at this beautiful wedge of leftover brownie from the brownie tart that Atyya brought to our Galentine's feast this past weekend. Amazing, right?

She offered to bring dessert and I had no qualms placing my trust in her. She's a great baker (her chocolate chip cookies using coconut oil are sooo good--like a much better version of those soft-baked Keebler ones). These brownies did not disappoint.

This is lightly adapted from an Ina Garten recipe. She subbed half the sugar for brown sugar and she melted some caramel candies to drizzle over the top. When dessert time rolled around, we zapped them in the microwave and I whipped some heavy cream to plop onto the brownies. They were incredibly decadent and incredibly delicious. Follow Ina's recipe and make Atyya's substitutions and you'll be the hit of your party.

I ate this for lunch and I'm not even sorry.

Lemon-braised dilly chicken and beans with a mint pesto

Even though we got together for the express purpose of drinking lots of wine and eating lots of chocolate, I still wanted to make my friends a dinner than was both healthy and hearty. It's snowy and icy and windy and altogether miserable outside, so I wanted to make sure that the meal I fed them was nourishing and fortifying.

The basis for this recipe came courtesy of one of my favorite places for food inspiration, theKitchn.com. I've learned more tips and tricks than you can shake a stick at from this website.

Within the last year, I have discovered my love of dried beans. That sounds very sad, but let me explain! When you cook them, dried beans get creamy, while still somehow retaining their texture. The convenience of canned beans cannot be denied, but they just don't taste the same. Canned beans are also not nearly as healthy for you, as manufacturers must add loads of salt and preservatives to the beans to keep them shelf-stable. If time is not of the essence, please consider using dried beans.

For this dish, I began by soaking my beans, a combination of half a pound of Great Northern white beans and half a pound of my Sangre de Toro beans from Rancho Gordo. I let them soak for a full 24 hours, but I think you could get away with just soaking them for eight or so, especially if you only use Great Northerns. I only used the Sangre de Toros because I thought they'd be festive (red and white, y'know) and because I had a half open bag that I wanted to use up. Here's what they looked like after soaking and plumping up for a day:

Ginger syrup and spicy drinks

I think I’m finally ready to flipflop on ginger. I used to hate it, but I think that’s because I associated it with:

• That gross pink pickled stuff they try to foist on you with your sushi
• Being sick

The first is self-explanatory really. It’s just the worst, isn’t it? Why ruin delicious sushi with this degraded form of a truly amazing plant? Go ahead, get absorbed in its Wikipedia page, I’ll wait.

Ok, you’re back. Awesome, right? Ginger is so good for you! I’ve embraced it wholeheartedly (as long as I can ignore the fact that gari is a thing).

The second reason I used to avoid it is that my mom would always boil ginger and ginseng together and make me drink it when I got sick. Maybe my juvenile palate just wasn’t ready for the two of them together in a strong hot drink. Now, I will use a little ginger syrup in hot water with plenty of lemon juice as a kind of winter tonic when I’m under the weather or starting to feel icky. The snappy ginger reminds me less of illness and more of the hours Mom's get-well tea spent boiling away on the stove just for me.

A great way to add more ginger to your diet is to make a honey ginger syrup that you can add to your drinks. You can add it to seltzer, tonic water, hot water, lemonade, green tea (decaf if you’re sick), chamomile tea, whiskey (a toddy can be restorative too!). Add a few squeezes of lemon juice and it’s basically perfect.

Beautiful Meyer lemon slices, one of my favorite mugs, and the dregs of my last batch of ginger syrup.

Spinach Salad with feta, red grapes, and a raspberry wine vinaigrette

The first thing we ate, after cracking open a bottle of red, was the spinach salad. I don't have any photos of the making of this, because I think you all know how a salad gets tossed together, right?

I do want to show you a picture of the giant container of organic spinach that I scored from Hmart (the closest Korean grocery store to me) for about $8. I'd already used half of it for salad, but still. Two pounds of spinach, y'all! 

 There's no real tricks to this recipe that pictures could help with, so I'll show you a blurry picture of a bowl of the finished product before giving you the recipe. (Disclaimer: My camera will have new batteries soon, so please forgive a few blurry pictures).

Feast, Galentine's Day edition

Hi, folks!


Valentine’s Day is for losers . . . says the bitter single part of me. Let’s start again. . . .

Valentine’s Day is for couples, of which I am not one half. So it was wonderful to spend the day after this infamous Day of Luuurve with some of my favorite single girlfriends. Three of my best friends from grad school came over to watch romantic movies and eat some great food.

We gorged ourselves on spinach salad with feta, red grapes, and a raspberry wine vinaigrette, lemon-braised dilly chicken with beans and mint pesto, and my friend Atyya's salted caramel brownies. She’s promised me the recipe—it’s based on something from Ina Garten, but she tweaked it quite a bit, including adding a drizzle of salted caramel on top (spoiler: they were INCREDIBLE). Oh, and we drank our way through two bottles of red wine--Cupcake Cabernet Sauvignon and Lo Nuevo's Sorbo a Sorbo Garnacha.

I also made a snappy honey ginger lemon spritzer, to cleanse the palate and settle our stomachs. This last bit was so that we could also eat peanut butter Lindt truffles and Trade Joe’s dark chocolate caramels—THIS IS A NO JUDGING ZONE. HATERS TO THE LEFT AND AWAY FROM THIS WEBSITE. If we can’t have our very own Lee Pace waiting for us at home, then we’re gonna eat our chocolate and drink our wine in the company of our fellows without any judgy comments, thank you.

Hi, friends!

It's always difficult to start the first of anything, right? The first step, the first grade, the first conversation, the first friendship, and so on. This is my first blog post, which I thought would be difficult, but somehow isn't. Maybe because I'm essentially writing to my friends (and the internet...) and I like writing to my friends.

Anyway, I guess I should explain my rationale for starting this blog, which will be primarily about my culinary highs (the feast) and lows (the foraging). I love cooking for people. Family, friends, colleagues, complete strangers in the grad student lounge. It's just the best feeling to offer a chocolate chip cookie to someone who's had a crappy day or to invite a friend over for a home-cooked meal when she's feeling homesick. I won't say that many of my friends were earned through cooking, but I will say that it's what draws many of them in at first. That and my infectious good humor . . . Hah. Yeah, it's mostly the lure of freshly baked cookies.