A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Happy (Early) St. Pat's: Corned Beef, Colcannon, & Green Bread

Happy St. Pat's Day  a little early! I'm working most of the weekend including Monday but I wanted to share this meal with you.  Yum! St. Pat's food is one of my favorite go to for celebratory meals. Don't know why I don't prepare it more often.  Actually, the Reuben is my all time favorite sandwich and corned beef hash and eggs is my favorite breakfast. Can't go wrong with corned beef and cabbage in any form!

By the way, the green bread is a joke. It's simply my standard white bread everyday recipe that I added green food paste coloring to for some St. Pat's silliness.

As for the holiday itself, St. Patrick is credited with both driving the snakes and the pagans out of Ireland. As Ireland's patron saint, Patrick is attributed with using the abundant shamrock as a teaching tool to explain the three-in-one nature of the Trinity.

This is my entry for this weeks'  Weekend Herb Blogging, originally created by the lovely Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen.  This week, WHB is hosted by Kel of the fabulously photographed Green Olive Tree.  Check out all the other entries after Sunday evening.

Cardamom is a spice, not technically an herb, but Kalyn's focus is on all herbs, spices, or plants.  Cardamom, my favorite spice, is used quite a bit in northern European and Middle Eastern cuisines.

Healthier Fish & Chips

Gene and I don't eat much fried food but every once in a while you have indulge yourself, right? There's nothing better than good fried fish and home-made fries.  But then getting it from most fast food or chain restaurants is mostly a nightmare of wanting in taste and healthiness.

I think I found a way to make a very decent meal at home while still not breaking the artery bank. 

New Daily Tiffin LunchBox Article

I have a new lunchbox article with recipes up at The Daily Tiffin called "Meat? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Meat!".

Also, I'm compiling the Tackiest Gift Stories now...

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: A New Year with Home-made Granola

It's a new year and although I did lose 15 lbs. last year it feels a hollow victory.  Does it really count if I lost and gained and lost and gained the same 10 lbs over and over and over again, barely inching my way down the scale throughout the year?  Maybe so but I really had higher hopes for the beginning of '08.  Sigh.  But such is life and there's no going back, only going forward.

The two things I'm really trying to tackle this month are the all important B and B's: Breakfast and Beverages. 

Let's start with soda.  I go up and down with my consumption but it's a constant battle against the addictiveness of Coke. Just love the stuff. If I have the choice between Pepsi and water, I'll choose the water, but if Coke is the choice, I'll drink it. The weird thing is I drink more of it at home than at work.  I'd think that would be the opposite but at work I'm moving around so much that I get dehydrated, know it, and crave water.  At home, nothing like an ice cold Coke. Right?  Okay, so I'm a product of effective advertising.

To fight my addiciton I've limited myself to an 8 oz serving a day and turned my attention to water, iced herbal tea, and Crystal Lite when I really need something flavored.  In the meantime I printed out this article and pasted in to the shelf above my desk and will read it every day and even change it out for articles in the same vein to keep myself reminded of just how healthy soda is. Not.

Take a look at this HEALTH BOLT: WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR BODY EVERY TIME YOU DRINK A SODA --  and we wonder why diabetes is so rampant in our culture. Armed with that bit of depression I'm drinking lots of iced herbal tea today with lots of water tonight at work.

Moving on to breakfast I thought  long and hard.  One of the mistakes I've made in past January gung-ho moments is to think that I'm suddenly going to change everything about myself in one fell swoop.  From past experience I think I can safely say that's not going to happen so instead I think I'll try to work with my natural inclinations.  For breakfast, I like carbs mostly.  I can do eggs but in my least healthy moments I'm more of a biscuits & gravy and hashbrowns kind of girl.  Well those are out, obviously, but what I did come up with was granola.  I like cereal but it usually leaves me starving by lunchtime, which is no surprise since most commercial cereals are little more than sugar held together by refined flour.

I decided to make my own granola, which I happen to love. It's hearty, delicious, and if I make my own I can control the ingredients 1) to shape it to my tastes or whims of the week, and 2) which means I can control the sugar.  That's a win-win.

Fudge and Fruit Bread: Another look at Christmas Desserts

I've already told you about the cream cheese cookie press cookies and the cranberry bread on the dessert table that was such a hit this year but one of the biggest surprise hits was the fudge.  Our family tradition is all about the peanut butter fudge. No one in my family even gives a flying flip about chocolate fudge, weird as that makes us, just peanut butter.  However, I was feeling a little lonely for MY favorite flavor and decided to make a go at it:  white chocolate maple.  Yum.

Thought I'd share a couple more pics from Christmas:

This is the kids all cracking up but I couldn't figure out why until Sydney signed to me that Suzanne (my sister) was making finger signs behind my head.  Duh.  I'm so slow on the uptake!

...and the Spirit of Christmas Upchucked All Over My House

There's something about ice storms that creates a frenzy of nesting.  Sure, maybe it's because last year at Christmastime we had the every 20 year ice storm from hell where Gene and I personally were without power for a whole eight hours but we had friends without power for up to THREE WEEKS.  There's an ice storm warning out for the whole area for the next...oh...three DAYS so the good news is the pantry is mostly full, the gas tanks topped off, I don't have to work until tomorrow night and only that one night for several days. Hmmm...that leaves me with cold, dreary freezing rain outside the windows which always gives me the itch to clean the house or, in this case, decorate the house with every Christmas doodad I've collected over the last 25 years.

Yes, of course I'll show photos and you'll feel sorry for Gene for having to wake up dreaming he's been camping out in the The Christmas Store.

Living room tree with Gene's Grinches and Christmas Bugs lined up. (Substitutes for children--the children in us.)

And here's the tree skirt that I absolutely love:

The side table in the kitchen with obviously the Nativity in the center. Flanked on each side are "Baking Santa" with cookies and gingerbread adornments

and if you look closely, the Christmas tree has mini baking tool ornaments on it.

Then about 7pm tonight it suddenly hit me. I MUST bake Christmas cake. I must.  I have no idea why it hit me so hard except for the challenge, the mystery, the sense of missing out on something.  You see, I have a google alert set up for "cake" just so I don't miss any great recipes or the occasional geek wedding cake designed to look like Yoda (I'm not kidding) or whatever. For the last several weeks the Brits have been going Christmas cake apeshit and...well...as a small child I never liked anyone to get anything I didn't.  Apparently it's still true as an adult so I decided that not another day could go by without me putting a Christmas cake, aka fruit cake, into the oven for most of the evening.

But there's an ice storm, remember?  I wasn't sure I had all the ingredients but I was determined and where there is a will there will be a way found or I get very cranky with myself.

Happy Hanukkah--Mmmm...Potato Latkes

After all the confessions I've made on this blog I'm sure at this point you don't even blink an eye when I admit to some peculiarity of personality so what the hell. Here's another one for the books:  I love religion. Everyone's religion. I'm sort of a mutt when it comes to religion.  I was raised by good people who claimed no religion who let me seek philosophy unrestrained on my own and so because of that freedom my youth was filled with wandering through most of the protestant religions available to me in my small town, everything in the range from Southern Baptist to Latter Day Saints.  Along the way, I came to realize a couple of things.  The greatest of these is that you can be spiritual without being rigid.  If religion is supposed to make us better people then I'm a big believer in gaining insight wherever I find it. While I celebrate the traditional Protestant holidays I was raised with, I always pause to appreciate all my friends' holy celebrations along the way.

I was inspired the other day by Governor Mitt Romney's recent speech about his religion and his candidacy. He expressed my own feelings so much more eloquently than I have when he said:

"I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings."

In honor of Hanukkah, Festival of Lights, we had a rememberance and potato latkes for dinner. The potatoes aren't the celebration, it's the oil by the way, and G-d knows I can get behind any religion that celebrates fried foods even if it's only for eight days once a year.  Seriously, the celebration is in honor of the Maccabean revolt in 165 BCE where the temple was regained from the Greeks and rededicated.  The miracle Hanukkah celebrates is that upon entering the temple, only one cruse of oil was found that hadn't been defiled by the Greeks.  That translates to one day's worth of oil to fuel the menorah but, miraculously, it lasted for eight days, enough time to rededicate and purify oil.  Hence, the oil, aka fried foods, connection to remind us of the miracle of a faith.

On the lighter side, here's Adam Sandler and The Hanukkah Song:

I have to say I was challenged a bit on this one. Asking a friend if she had any recipes I should specifically make, she replied in her email:

"If you can make Latkes without them tasing like motor oil...you will win the admiration of all Jews. Personally i like greasy food now and then..but these mothers soak up enough oil to make the Arab nations drool."

Now that's funny stuff and how could I not try to rise to the challenge on that one?

Thanksgiving turkey redux: Turkey Orzo Soup

I can't believe it's been a week since I've posted!  Man, that just shows you what working the weekend and having a bad cold will do for you--makes you a lazy bones!  I've almost literally done nothing but work, sleep, and whine the last week.  I've had my cold since Thanksgiving and somewhere along the line I wasn't careful enough and gave it to Gene, who I think is sicker than I am, although I whine louder and you know what that means: the squeaky wheel is the bigger pain in the butt.

But we're finally both feeling a little better so I have no excuses but to get back to my life including cooking tonight instead of ordering out and today, with God as my witness, I will be working on my novel. That back-up cd hasn't seen the light of day in at least a couple of weeks and I originally promised myself it would be finished by the end of the year which is fastly approaching. Sigh.

But before I pull that out, let me tell you real quick about the soup I made the other night that was, as Mr Food says "Oooooohhhh, so good!", and another pasta soup for Ruth's weekly Presto Pasta Nights.  Check her blog on Friday to see this weeks round up! 

Thanksgiving Leftovers: Turkey Pasta Soup

Ruth over at Once Upon a Feast hosts a great weekly food event called Presto Pasta Nights.  She posts a round up every Friday of the previous week's great pasta dishes. 

I'm getting back into the groove of  pasta night with my turkey leftovers in a pasta soup last night.  It's all about the broth, comforting in its turkey goodness with an attention-getting mix of pasta shapes to devour.

One of the interesting little secrets about this soup was that I followed Gene's initiative and spooned it over some leftover dressing from Thanksgiving.  It may sound odd but it's really yummy, giving the soup just an extra weight and oomph, turning it from "just soup" into a full meal for Gene.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: Veggie Patty-licious

This is the story of how these ingredients:

became dinner:

It all started with the book "Skinny Bitch" by  Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman, a "diet" book with colorful language that cracked me up and inspired me.  The book basically advocates vegan eating.  I'll be honest. The book itself didn't give me any new info.  I've heard this all before. I read Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation and I lived in Eureka Springs, which is the Taos of the Ozarks. I've heard the whole cruelty to animals speech and I do not dispute it. I just freely admit that it never before kept me away from a tall glass of milk or a medium rare filet. 

Until Skinny Bitch. For some reason, the presentation whether it's simply the confrontational attitude or the multitudinous amount of swear words (which I loved, by the way) made me pay attention this time. Still, to be completely honest, it's not even the PETA speech that gets me, it's just that I suddenly thought "I've never really liked eating meat...so why am I doing it?"  I could get up on a big moral high horse and tell you that I've been enlighted and that the poor fish hurt from being hooked but that really isn't me or how I think.  We're people; they're animals. We're the top of the food chain.  I'm middle America all the way and I know it. I grew up in a family of hunters in a community of hunters.  My dad and his friends took vacation time to go out in the deer field every year.  My siblings and I all knew how to cast a fishing line practically before we could walk.  BUT, unlike a former acquaintance whose father goes to Africa twice a year to shoot big game just so he can hang heads and skins on his den walls, my family ate what dad brought down. We grew up poor and I admit my dad poached deer like crazy to put meat on our table. I still have no problem with that at all, nor do I have a problem with people who do eat meat.  On the flip side, I've known for a long time that as long as I eat a varied vegetarian diet I'll get plenty of protein and I'm very well aware that factory farms are not the same thing as hunting a deer or two out in their natural habitat for my family's personal use and to keep the deer populations from starving themselves out.  One is conservation; the other is a really poor process that's mostly about dollars not purity of food or compassion for animals. Of course, I don't like the idea of factory farming animals in cruel ways although I stop short at the argument that if we didn't eat cows the ozone  layer would be safe from cow farts. 

I know I'm simplifying but I'm doing it to keep things light not because I take these things lightly.

My point is, in a nutshell, I don't want to pretend to be something I'm not.  For me, this is all about how nice it would be to get off the protein guilt merry-go-round and not worry about it all the time. I can't tell you how many years I've spent preferring to eat a quinoa salad or a vegetable salad with a thick piece of whole-grained peasant bread but denying myself thinking I had to eat a hunk of meat. Well, no more. I'm not completely locking myself in because, quite frankly, I don't do well with ever telling myself "no" to anything without a rebellious back door to escape thorugh when I feel the need, but over the last few weeks the only animal flesh I've had is teeny amount of chicken in soup, part of a crab cake, and two bites of Gene's birthday steak.  I just don't crave meat so I'm getting off the guilt ride, South Beach and Atkins be damned.

Earlier in the year, I went on a 3 month diet with coworkers and lost 20 lbs.  Since then I've gained back 8 lbs followed by losing 4 lbs the first week I stopped eating meat, followed by I'm-not-sure-what-but-it-can't-be-good (I refuse to get on the scale) since this horrible past week where I've been ravenous at night and the voices in my head won't shut up until I feed them popcorn covered in butter and melted marshmallow at 2am.  Being inside my own head is like living out a Stephen King novel behind my eyes at times.