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Party Of One: Tips On Cooking For Yourself
Even if you’re not a great cook or live in a dorm room, bachelor
apartment, or other accommodation without a full kitchen, you can learn
to cook tasty, healthy, and inexpensive meals.
food project #1. was preserving more sour cherries. shayn pitted and
washed them, then we added some sugar and let them macerate. once the
sugar was dissolved, we froze them in a tub. for some reason, they
didn't freeze very quickly, so last night i put some of the cherry sauce
over my froyo and it was AMAZING. the longer-term plan for the
cherries, if i get final say, is a white chocolate-mascarpone tart,
maybe with a graham cracker crust, maybe with an almond crust. but, it's
nice being able to take them out and use them at will!
food project #2. I made some arugula pesto--arugula, sauteed garlic, almonds, parm, salt, pepper--and discovered the total genius that is the kitchenaid food mill attachment.
it makes your pesto this lovely consistency where you don't have to add
much, if any, olive oil, so the flavors themselves stand out really
well. it doesn't puree like a food processor tends to. and you don't
have to mess with it and add lots of liquid like you do with a blender.
furthermore, you can apparently get attachments with it to make pasta
noodles, though I don't have those yet, which would even make it more functional. Furthermore, I decided to use that attachment again to make a different kind
of pesto (which, with the aforementioned arugula pesto, and the garlic
scape pesto we made before, makes 3 types of pesto made
in one week in our house!), while at the Farmers Market I noticed a huge amount of communal cilantro. After picking several
handfuls. I ended up taking a few raw cashews from the market as well. Its Sunday morning, time for pesto-making; a few cubes of parm, a clove of elephant garlic,
some overgrown chives from the garden that had gotten a little bit woody
so weren't good for straight eating anymore, all into the food grinder!
after everything was ground up--which, by the way, is so awesome to
watch!--I mixed in a splash of the nice olive oil and a little salt and pepper
and we were done! cilantro pesto, mmmmmm.
food project #3 last night, I made beet chips. also quick and easy. I sliced beets using a mandoline, tossed with olive oil and salt and pepper, and put in a
single layer (I learned my lesson) on a baking sheet for 6-8 minutes.
really, really good, and a nice way to eat a lot of beets (if, say, your CSA is giving you so many of them but it seems like a funny time for
beets since it is SUMMER NOT FALL and so you have to trick yourself into
liking them)!
RECOMMENDED DINNER (aka how I combined random stuff to eat last night):
raw kale salad (dinosaur kale, carrots, garlic scapes, chive vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper)beet chips (see above) whole wheat toast that I got- huge day-old bag of from Ralphs, with
thinly sliced cheddar cheese (I used my veg peeler) and cilantro pesto. and vanilla frozen yogurt with cherries
Went to the garden and picked lettuce and the last couple of chive blossoms I could find. Below is a picture of chive blossoms
