Sweet and sour purple cabbage

I went and did it again - bought more cabbage. This time, at least, it was purple, which is mildly exciting. And when I added enough bacon, it was actually quite tasty. I recommend this dish, because it doesn't taste like cabbage, it tastes like sweet and sour bacon, and its PURPLE! Not Ed-rating, since he isn't in Amherst, but I did deem the dish tasty enough to bring another batch to the training camp last weekend, where it was generally agreed that 1) bacon is delicious, and 2) this didn't taste like cabbage. So with that ringing recommendation, here's the recipe!

Sweet and sour purple cabbage
Made enough for 12 modest servings

1 head of purple cabbage
1/2lb bacon
1 onion
~1/4C lemon juice, or just juice from a lemon
~2tbs white sugar
salt to taste
cilantro (optional)

I'm not sure the cabbage has to be purple, but at least that'll make the dish pretty, and it's not like purple cabbages cost more than the green kind. I also learned the lesson that buying the $2.50/lb bacon is not necessarily a good thing. It rendered out a WHOLE lot of fat. I should find a use for bacon grease... popovers?

Dice up the bacon, and throw that in a large frying pan. Render out most of the grease, and pour most of it off. Dice the onion, and cook that down for a while, until it is soft and beginning to taste sweet. Chop the cabbage into little chunks, and put that in the pan. Add the lemon juice and sugar and some salt (a couple pinches). Cover, and let it cook for a while. Take the cover off, stir around, and let it cook some more. It's done when the cabbage is soft and silky. Add the chopped cilantro, and serve warm or cold.

Dessert crepes

When Chris was here for the marathon, I made crepes for dessert one night. So delicious! We filled them with maple syrup-sweetened ricotta, raspberries, and maple whipped cream, and I think we were all pretty much in heaven. It helped that we'd also had delicious fish tacos for dinner, so it was hard to go wrong, but I'll be making these again. The recipe is from Dave Lieberman's website, but it seems pretty standard.



Crepes
Made about 10 pancakes
3/4C flour
1tsp salt
1C milk (I used whole)
2 eggs
2 tbs sugar
1tbs melted butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Put everything in a bowl and whisk. Heat some butter in a nonstick frying pan, and pour a small amount (~1/4C worth of batter) of batter into the pan, and swirl the pan around to spread out the batter. Cook for a few minutes on that side, until the bubbles on top aren't filling in after popping. Flip the crepe, and cook another minute or so on that side. Eat immediately!



Maple-sweetened ricotta:
Made ~1.5C
2C whole milk
~2tbs lemon juice
pinch of salt
1 tbs maple syrup

Put the milk and salt in a saucepan, and heat until just before it starts to simmer. Remove from heat and add the lemon juice, stir that around. It should immediately start to curdle. Let it sit there curdling for 10 minutes or so, and then pour it through a cheesecloth into a straining device. Let that sit and drain for 5-10 minutes. Put it into a bowl, and stir in the maple syrup. If you want the ricotta harder packed, you can squeeze it; I prefer a loose, gloopy cheese for filling crepes.

The raspberries were just frozen raspberries, microwaved to thaw, and to get some juice from them. The maple whipped cream was cream whipped with maybe 1tbs of maple syrup.

Put some of everything inside your crepe, and roll it up. Try not to drool, because these are delicious!

Sandwiches

Last week, I decided that I didn't feel like "cooking", so I would just buy sandwich ingredients and eat sandwiches all week. At the time, that seemed like a good idea, but then I remembered that I don't actually like sandwiches. If there is melted cheese involved, that's ok, but cold cuts sort of turn my stomach. I guess if I'd not started making grilled cheeses, it would have been some sort of horrid sandwich-diet. Ugh. I discovered, in buying the ingredients I felt were necessary to make a good sandwich, that sandwiches cost a lot of money. I made the bread, but buying deli turkey, bacon, basil (couldn't bear to cut off Barry's leaves... he isn't doing too well to begin with, I'm hoping that leaving him with all his photosynthesizing bits will help him out), sprouts, hummus, mustard, avocado, cheese, and salad ingredients - that was probably my most expensive run at the grocery store I've made in the last couple months. Yikes. How do people afford to eat sandwiches?

So after looking at that bill, I figured I damn well better enjoy my sandwiches. Unfortunately, it just wasn't going to happen. So once I ran out of turkey and bacon and avocado (that only took two days), it was back to grilled cheeses. And broiled cheese-on-bread. Melted cheese is delicious. Add bacon, and you have a double deliciousness!


The first few bites were delicious - turkey, bacon, avocado, sprouts, basil leaves, hummus on one piece of bread, yummy mustard on the other side, roasted red peppers - it was a far cry from those bland bread-and-ham sandwiches that I ate every. single. day. of highschool. I think that's where my hatred of sandwiches dates back to. I keep trying to make myself like them... melted cheese helps.


Next up was grilled cheese. Basically, I had a cold sandwich for lunch and melted cheese deliciousness for dinner - sort of like a reward for eating the cold sandwich. These photos don't do justice to how delicious that grilled cheese sandwich actually was. Cheese (a mix of cheddar and mozzarella in this case), basil, bacon, and bread.

By the end of the week, I was going for full-blown open-faced bread-and-cheese. Far superior to sandwiches. This is getting closer to pizza, which is delicious.
This one finished off my cheese stash - basil and sundried tomatoes underneath some cheddar and shredded mozzarella.

Next time, it'll be a week of pizza, not sandwiches. I had to try, I guess. At least I seem to be over the gag reflex.

Cabbage wedges

I don't usually buy cabbage, because there is just so damn much of it once you buy it, and because it doesn't actually taste that good. But, it's cheap, and relatively nutritious, and I was at Whole Foods (aka Whole paycheck), and needed more veggies without breaking the bank, so I bought a cabbage. One of the relatively small, light green ones.

The first thing I tried was stir frying it with a bunch of other veggies, but that wasn't exactly exciting. And that only used up half of it. I looked around at recipes for cabbage, but it seems that usually it's used as a filler, no surprise there. So I decided to go my usual vegetable route - apply heat, olive oil, and salt, and see what happens. What happened was actually pretty good, with brown bits and flavor. I'm not sure I'd recommend this for anything other than using up cabbage, because while it tasted perfectly fine, it was hardly exciting. Maybe if you had a delicious sauce to pour over the top, or if you were on some sort of cabbage diet. Or if you just really like cabbage - the overall flavor was "cabbage", which actually reminded me of most brassicaceae, like brussels sprouts, which I love. So, maybe I'll try this again, we'll see...

Cabbage Wedges
Made 4 wedges, depending on how much you like cabbage that would be good for 1 - 4 people
1/2 head of savoy cabbage
Olive oil
Kosher salt

Cut the cabbage into wedges, leaving the stem on, to hold the leaves together. Heat some oil in a frying pan, medium-ish heat. Put in the cabbage wedges, and salt the upper side. Let them sit there for about five minutes, until they're looking nice and golden brown on the bottom. Flip, and salt the upper side (which hasn't had salt yet). Let them sit there for another 5-10 minutes, until the stems are nice and soft if you poke them with a fork. You can flip and keep cooking if you like them to be softer, I guess I like my veggies to have a bit of a bite.

Serve as is, or with a sauce of some sort. The flavor is pretty neutral, and the texture is fairly smooth, with some crunch. Not actually all that bad, considering that it's cabbage...

I guess I was feeling Irish today. Or something like that.

Eating PRO on the go - creative pork loin...

I may have mentioned that our kitchen is pretty small. We have an oven, but it is about the size of a toaster oven. I did find some sort of baking sheet equivalent thing, sort of, so I decided to cook a pork tenderloin in the oven. It worked, and actually tasted pretty good. I served it with sweet potatoes, and cauliflower and cheese and caramelized onions. And couscous. Mostly, I made a fancy meal because I was refusing to eat pasta every single night this week - Greg would have been happy, but I think Cristina would have gotten annoyed too.


Pork tenderloin stuffed with caramelized onions:
Served 3, but one of them was Greg, so probably would serve 4 normal people

1/2kg pork tenderloin
1 onion
olive oil
salt
pepper (in this case, lemon pepper, as it came with the apartment)

Preheat the oven to 200C ish. Chop the onion, and cook it down in a frying pan with some salt and oil for a while, until its golden brown and delicious. Add salt and oil as needed. Cut the pork tenderloin almost in half, lengthwise - basically, butterfly it. Stuff with onions. Rub copious amounts of salt and pepper on top. Cook for 30min, more or less, until it looks and tastes done. I'm sure there is a temperature it should have been at, but, our snow thermometer doesn't have a meat probe.

The sweet potatoes were simple - cut them into wedges, toss with olive oil and salt, and bake (at like 250C, or more like 400-450F) until they're also golden-brown and delicious. They are wonderful, because the sugar inside makes them crunchy and caramelized.

Did I mention that we're using a McDonald's tray as a cutting board? High class.

The cauliflower was also delicious. I caramelized more onions, and then sauteed the cauliflower until it was soft. Then, add cheese chunks.

That was a darn tasty dinner for only being prepared in a kitchen the size of my bed at home. I impressed myself. I think tomorrow we'll have pasta and meatballs again, though...

Eating PRO on the go - in Sweden!

I'm in Sweden for the ski-o world champs, and Greg, Cristina, and I are here training in Mora for a couple days. We're in a dorm room type situation, in a bit room with a tiny kitchen, so we've been making use of that. So far, so good!

The meal last night was spaghetti and meatballs, sort of. Swedish meatballs are delicious. The sauce was one can of little cherry tomatoes (in tomato juice), half a leek, an onion, some garlic, some carrot, and some mushrooms. It was also delicious.




Then, the pasta was covered with cheese. Win!

Popovers

Ed has been hunting for the perfect popover recipe, and I am hardly complaining. It's rough, having to consume a batch of popovers every few days. Anyway, I think he may have stumbled onto the winning recipe. The trick seems to be that you have to fill the tins pretty full, so that there is enough batter to let them really pop.




The recipe, if I can remember it, is as follows:
1C flour
2 large eggs
1C milk
1 tbs melted butter
salt?

Preheat the oven to 425, and put a liberally-greased muffin tin in there to warm up.

You beat together the eggs and milk, add in the butter, beat it some more, then beat in the flour. There must have been some salt, call it 1/4 teaspoon. Take the muffin tin out of the oven, and pour in the batter, filling the cups to almost full. I think this filled 10 of 12 cups. Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, without opening the oven. Lower the heat to 375, and bake another 10 minutes, then you can peek. If they're starting to be too brown, call them done, if they're still yellow, let them keep cooking another 5 minutes.

Turn off the oven, take out the popovers, pop the side with a fork or a knife, and return them to the oven for 5 minutes. Apparently this helps them keep their pop.

Then do your best not to eat the entire batch all at once. They're pretty tasty.