The ice cream is Peach Cobbler. Diced canned peaches and shortbread cookie chunks in a sweet cream base (with a little bit of the syrup from the can). It’s also just supposed to whet your appetite for more to come. My hard drive died, so my computer was on vacation for a few days. This means good and bad news.

The good news is I have twice as big a hard drive than I did before.

The bad news is I’m a little behind in blog posts. This is also a busy week, but I’ve got lots of ideas rolling around, so stay tuned.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am practicing my grilling skills as often as possible. Why?

1) It’s summertime. Grilling season!

2) WHY NOT?

Last night’s grilling adventures involved a re-do of the Basil Mint Lemon marinade I used for the Father’s Day swordfish. As I mentioned in that entry, I wanted to try putting all the sauce ingredients in the food processor. So I did, and it worked out beautifully! I changed things around a little bit… First and foremost, I used chicken (marinaded in the pesto-like sauce for about an hour and a half). For the sauce itself, I added salt (to taste), pepper (to taste), and sugar (1 tsp.) to the mint/basil/lemon juice/olive oil combo. Delicious!

On the skewers, I layered smaller chicken pieces with orange and yellow peppers, vidalia onions, and lemon wedges. It is important to put the lemon wedges directly next to the chicken slices so the juice from the lemons seasons the chicken even further. (Extra delightful- when you slide all the stuff off the skewers, it squeezes all the lemon juice out!)

You noticed I don’t have pictures of the cooked meal… Oops. Too good to waste time taking pictures! I served it with plain couscous and the remainder of the sauce. I

Oh, and dessert… MMM. Grilled peaches with REAL maple syrup. No pictures of that, either. Sorry, kids.

Instead, here’s a tasty treat (non-grill-related).

I’ve been making Jasmine Green iced tea with honey. So delicious. Trader Joe’s makes delicious Jasmine Green, at only $1.99 a box! Make sure to add the honey (and stir!) while the tea is still hot or else it won’t dissolve.

Happy July!

MMM! For the 4th, I took another spin at grilled pizza. This time, I had a helpful assistant to help take some pictures while we prepped and cooked. We accompanied the pizza with grilled asparagus and corn. Another lousy meal…. HA. Yeah right. Hopefully the following pictures will help you in your own grilled pizza making adventures.

Marinated asparagus, ready to grill. Oil and balsamic with salt and pepper.

Prepared pesto.

Veggies waiting. This round, I used baby arugula instead of spinach, and rather than prosciutto, I used sweet Italian sausage.

Pizza assembly on the grill.

Now THIS…

…is the 4th of July, as it should be.

We really ended the whole show with homemade sweet cream ice cream with hot fudge and fresh, local strawberries…. YUM. A lovely evening of eating.

I think I’ve earned it.

My dad and stepmom are heading for Africa today. I’ve been living with them for a few weeks and now will continue to enjoy the 6-burner professional stove, propane grill, and the non-stickiest pots and pans in their absence (I will also be feeding the cat, watering the plants, and bringing in the mail/papers). Last night I really wanted to cook something for them so they wouldn’t have to worry about dinner but would sleep with full bellies, readied for their long flights.

And, OH, how full our bellies were!

Ladies and gents, I present to you: Grilled Pesto Pizza with Spinach, Tomato, Orange Bell Pepper, and Prosciutto.

Bells are ringing and cherubs are circling as I think about how amazing these pizzas tasted. GOOD HEAVENS. I’ll admit to you that it was not an original idea. It was actually inspired by Buford’s Heat– Bill wrote about Mario Batali’s attempts at perfecting grill pizza. I don’t know if it’s quite the same thing that Mario makes… his might actually be on a flat-top, but I took the words into my own hands and molded them into a reality.

I had some various Food Network recipes to help me figure out the logistics of grilling a pizza. It certainly requires some savvy I had not previously possessed. After reading a few different recipes, I decided I was prepared to take another spin at the grill.

I broke my arm patting myself on the back last night. These pizzas were amazing, and I am so proud of myself for conceiving and creating them (and for the help I found to do so). Maybe I’ll make them every night! Really… I just might.

Here’s a(n approximate) recipe. Enjoy!!

Grilled Pesto Pizza with Spinach, Tomato, Orange Bell Pepper, and Prosciutto

Prep time: 30 mintues

Grill time: 10 minutes

Servings: 6

Ingredients

2 lb. basic pizza dough (you can make it yourself or purchase bags of uncooked dough at most grocery stores in the bakery section)

1 cup basil pesto (fresh is best, recipe follows, but out of a jar would be a quick fix)

1 sliced and sautéed orange pepper

1 cup sliced grape or cherry tomatoes

3 cups chopped spinach

8-10 slices of prosciutto, diced (as diced as prosciutto can get)

20 oz. grated mozzarella

3 Tbsp. olive oil

Preparation

Heat grill to high-medium heat. Separate pizza dough into three equally sized balls. Roll out each ball of dough, to approx. 1/4″ thick. Brush one side of each with olive oil, and place that side down on the grill for 3 minutes (should be a little charred, but not burnt) or until stiff on bottom. Brush tops with olive oil and flip. Immediately spread pesto on tops, and then distribute toppings in your preferred order (I put the spinach under the cheese so it wilts nicely). Close grill lid and cook until cheese is melted and crusts are cooked through.

Serve immediately and enjoy!!

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Basil Pesto

Prep time: 10 minutes

Yields: 1 cup

Ingredients

3 cups fresh basil leaves

4 cloves garlic, diced

4 Tbsp. olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

Place all ingredients into a food processor and blend until basil is a paste.

This should be used immediately- it does not keep. You can freeze it, but I don’t know exactly how it will reheat as I haven’t done this before. Look it up!

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Good luck!!!! Again, let me know if something is unclear or missing.

SCENE: Last night, in the kitchen.

STEPMOM (watching me sautée mushrooms, tomatoes and onions with sweet basil chicken sausages): You are your father’s daughter! I never could grasp the concept of cooking for one.

SELF (sautéing): When I know I can cook a delicious meal and have the time for it, why would I do anything else?

Yes, I am confident in my cooking skills. When people ask me if I am a good cook, I affirm wholeheartedly. How do I know? Because when I eat the things I have made, they taste wonderful. I’ll be the first to admit that I am most certainly not an expert chef, but I have learned enough about the subtleties of flavor that I can walk around a grocery store and formulate a meal.

In that passing conversation with my stepmom, I realized that those one-person-meals I’ve always made for myself are exactly how I learned to cook well. The risks aren’t quite as high (i.e. only you will know it is too salty/undercooked/overcooked/bland), so the stress of cooking for yourself is way lower. Sure it can be tough to scale down big recipes (easy fix: learn how to use the freezer and love leftovers–some sauces, soups, and stews taste better with time) or intimidating because you don’t want to ruin expensive ingredients, but you’ll never learn unless you try, RIGHT?

My point is that it is NOT hard to be a good cook. Really, it isn’t.

There are really only a few things that you might need to change about your lifestyle to really make it work for you. This is how I did it!

1) Have the right equipment.

Liquid cup measures and dry cup measures are slightly different. Have both! They can be reasonably priced at places like Target.

Measuring spoons are exactly right… using the same spoon with which you eat your morning cereal is not precise.

2) Learn how to read a recipe!!!

The introductions to most cookbooks tell you exactly what each word means that they will use in recipes. Many even have tips on where to find substitute ingredients if it’s a rare or exotic one.  If you read this section ONCE, you will be in better shape.  Also, you must have heard about this grand thing called the internet… I bet if you look up specific instructions like “how to fold in butter” or “how to blanch a pepper” you’ll find some pretty helpful info (maybe even a YouTube video!!).

3) Choose recipes that are on your level–and FOLLOW THEM.

If you read something and you have to ask “what does that even MEAN?” about more than one or two steps listed, you’re probably reaching too far. Start with simple recipes, like making pizza or a basic pasta sauce. After you’ve begun to understand the science of cooking you can start messing around with recipes, improvising, substituting ingredients. You don’t have to be deft and daring in the kitchen just yet. I made the same pasta sauce recipe several times before I started to make little changes (ONE AT A TIME so you can easily determine a mistake if one occurs).

Naturally, there are different levels of talent and experience, but I can assure you that pratice can make you into a master. One of the reasons I find this so important is that I want to know exactly what I’m putting in my body. Plus, I’d be willing to argue that homemade meals always taste better than powdered-pumped-with-preservatives-out-of-the-box meals. I wanted to give a quick recipe (for 1) for those who might insist they don’t have the time to cook- in fact, it is the exact recipe I was preparing last night when this all came into my mind!

Couscous with Chicken Sausage and Sautéed Vegetables

Servings: 1 large, 2 smaller

Prep time: 20 minutes

1 cup couscous

2 chicken sausages (I got Sweet Basil Pesto flavored chicken/turkey sausages from Trader Joe’s.)

2-3 Tbsp. olive oil

1/2 yellow onion (you could try other kinds of onion, if you wanted)

1 cup grape or cherry tomatoes

1 cup mushrooms

Splash of white wine or cooking sherry

1/4 tsp. garlic powder

1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes

Salt and pepper to taste

Grated parmesan

Slice onion into thin, long pieces. Thinly slice tomatoes and mushrooms. Prepare couscous according to box (usually involves boiling water, stirring in couscous and removing the pan from heat for 5 mintues. *TIP: it can sit for longer than 5 minutes without drying out, so don’t feel like you have to babysit it. You could even prepare the couscous prior to starting the rest of the recipe if you felt like multi-tasking would be too much over a hot stove). While couscous water is boiling, heat olive oil in skillet (medium heat). Once hot, place sausages and onions in skillet to pan fry. Sausages will take approx. 15 minutes to fry, turn them frequently to prevent burning. After 10 minutes add tomatoes and mushrooms, wine or sherry, garlic powder, red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper. Sautée for 5 minutes or until mushrooms no longer appear dry. Remove from heat. Slice cooked sausages and serve sautéed vegetables and sausage on a bed of couscous with grated parmesan on top.

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I haven’t written many recipes, so let me know if you have any questions before you try it. I just created this the other night from things sitting around in the fridge… if you get experimental, add some other vegetables or maybe some sauce of some kind. Try it with pasta or rice if you feel like it. Let me know what works for you and what doesn’t.

Happy cooking!

I’ve been working hard to take good care of my body, lately: eating as best I can, drinking lots of water, getting good exercise, and sleeping as well as I can.

Water is the one that I’m most pumped about today. I’ve been looking into water bottles for a few months (I try to be an informed consumer), because I’d heard so much about regular plastic and even Nalgenes being unhealthy in the long-run. I’d been a Nalgene fan for years (I had four different bottles by them), but didn’t want to drink toxic water anymore.

The first alternative I learned about was Sigg- made of aluminum, cool designs on the bottles, eco-friendly… good! Not so good: the coating on the inside has been targeted as a potential hazard (I don’t know the specifics, really, but a coating on the inside of a water bottle seems counter-intuitive). Then I learned about Klean Kanteen, made of stainless steel with no coating–simple bottle design, but I dig simple. Priced about the same as the Sigg, I was confident I had found my bottle-to-be.

My stepmom has a Klean Kanteen, so I asked her where in the area I could find one. As she was telling me, my dad jumped in and said “Oh! I have a water bottle you could have!”

“A Klean Kanteen?”

“No, but it’s stainless steel.”

So I checked it out… boy oh BOY did I check it out. I took this thinksport bottle for a spin over the past two days:

,

I am floored about this water bottle. Never have I met a water bottle so successful at being a water bottle.

(DISCLAIMER: I KNOW I AM A HUGE NERD)

Why is this bottle so great? I’ll tell you why.

1) It’s attractive.

2) It has both a large and small opening for different styles of drinking (see above images).

3) It has a little mesh filter (not pictured) that fits inside the top so the ice doesn’t come sloshing out, or if you brewed some loose leaf tea in it, you’d be all set to drink it without getting tea leaves in your mouth, OR if you decided to use it as a cocktail shaker, you’d be TOTALLY set.

4) It’s double-walled stainless steel–both durable and effectively insulating*.

*This I know from my trial run with the thinksport. Yesterday, around noon, I filled up my thinksport with ice cubes and the rest with water. I didn’t drink much out of it, but took a small sip around 7pm. Holy cow! The water was still icy cold! I left it in my car overnight, and when I returned today around noon, I took another sip. ICE COLD. Wait a minute… what’s that sound? Are those ice cubes in my bottle? After 24 HOURS there were 3 or 4 ice cubes still remaining in my thinksport!! Amazing. AMAZING. This bottle and I have quite the future together.

I am absolutely astounded at technology. I am looking at the world in a totally different way. I commend you, thinksport, for being so damn awesome: you have changed the way I look at bottles and it is GOOD, so good.

My dears, I have a few things to report on. Food related things! I love food.

1) I just finished reading Heat by Bill Buford.

It was a graduation gift, and a great one, at that. It is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it if you like to cook, even a little bit. It reminded me that I can do whatever I want in the world as long as I have a good reason, forced me to realize that restaurant cooking is NOT my dream job, and inspired me to reach for more in my own kitchen–I can be an even better cook than I already am. This last point leads me to item 2…

2) I finished reading Heat on the morning of Father’s Day. Last year for Father’s Day, my sister and I cooked/grilled up a feast for my dad, and especially after being inspired to be a better cook, I was so ready to take that on again. This time my stepmom helped me. One of the things I’m trying to focus on lately is more seasonally-geared eating. I found a few recipes that seemed mid-June friendly and seemed like they would work well together. I didn’t take pictures (sorry), but I found some on the net so you can drool as you think about how good they probably tasted.

I made grilled swordfish with lemon, mint and basil:

With creamy mushroom risotto:

and grilled asparagus:

MMMMM!!!!! Is that what you’re thinking? That’s what it was. MMMMMMMMM DELICIOUS. I tweaked recipes, as I always do. For the swordfish sauce, I doubled the amounts of both mint and basil… next time I try this, I plan to use a food processor or blender to make a sort of pesto-like sauce rather than having the big chunks of basil and mint and garlic (if you try that, let me know how it goes). I used fresh mushrooms for the risotto, just about doubled the amount of them, but still poured a cup of boiling water over them to extract some juices to help flavor the risotto. I totally improvised with the asparagus, drizzling them in balsamic vinegar and olive oil and then sprinkling with salt, pepper, and garlic powder (did this first and let it sit, marinating, while I made the risotto, heated up the grill, etc.).

I took some risks with this meal since I have grilled only as many times as I have fingers on my right hand (if that), have never before cooked fish (except shrimp), and had a limited amount of time to pull it all off. I am thrilled to report that everything went well, my kitchen-instincts guided me truly, and Dad seemed pleased and full at the end of the meal.

Success!

Graduating from college is a really de-humanizing experience (hey Mom, did you catch that? Graduating FROM college!). It just sucks the contentment right out of a 22-year-old.

Sure, it has its highlights (a Bachelor’s Degree would be one of them… freedom would be another), But the lowlights are the things that really slapped me in the ass as I walked out the revolving door of my education: the future of LOAN PAYMENTS. That’ll do it! Also, the prospect that I have to figure it out. I have to figure out life and myself and employment and insurance and habitat and relationships and fun: IT.

For weeks now, I have been wrestling with it. The last post I wrote was an indication of that, perhaps, but for the first time since mid-April(ish), I have felt good for a whole week. Part of it is probably that I started exercising again. I started focusing more on eating a little more consciously- lots of fruit and vegetables (today I had fresh cherries, celery with chunky peanut butter, and a salad with tomatoes and craisins and mushrooms and green peppers and chives for lunch). I will soon start to sleep better, once I have a routine up here in Amherst. I am getting a haircut tomorrow that will be more summer-manageable, and I have some new things to wear that I love (thanks, Mom!).

The point is, I am feeling like myself. I captured back some of the humanity that graduation burgled from me. Even though things are no less complicated than they were weeks ago, they are not weighing so heavily on me as to paralyze me with fear.

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Note to readers: Now that I’m back in a happier place, I will move away from personal testimony and back towards fun things I’m making or pictures or food or whatever else I think might interest you. Feel free to leave suggestions!

For the first time since maybe September, I just went for a run. I’m visiting my mom right now, so I brought the dog with me. We’re now both reclining on my bed after cooling down and stretching–she’s panting like a maniac and my body is shaking because it forgot what exercise was. It felt so good to get out in the sun and get some exercise.

The past month and a half has been turbulent and challenging, and I should’ve been doing more things (like running) that made me feel good. I have graduated from college. That means thousands of different things, but the most clear is that I am now solely responsible for myself. Yes, I do have a support network of people that care about me, but things are different now. I am operating solo and it is an alarming experience.

All of my plans have changed. Boston and Cambridge, I’m not returning to you in the near future. You’ve been a wonderful place for me, but I need some open land and tall trees whose roots aren’t surrounded by cement. Amherst is offering me some physical space to think, think, think. I am going to take it. I am going to fix up the bike I just got, find your running trails, and take care of your children for a few months.

After those months… who knows? Maybe I’ll be ready for Boston again. Or maybe it’ll be Tahiti, London, or Bolivia. More likely, I’ll stay in Amherst for a little bit longer. Maybe I’ll just pace myself–that’s the most important thing I learned about distance running back when I was on the team in high school. You must be able to pace yourself well enough that you can do your entire workout at the same speed. Even if you’re going a little slower than you’d like, you should be able to maintain that same speed for the best possible gain of endurance.

I’ll pace myself, stretch diligently, and have nice, long cool downs. Maybe I’ll work a few sprint workouts in, here and there, but I’m going to run for the enjoyment of it.

This one is for my momma, especially. She loves window pictures–something about the frame being inside the picture is very appealing to her. I liked this little window very much.