za’atar

Spice mixes are fun. Making spice mixes is fun. You learn so much! Oh that’s how they get that flavor! Plus, if you make them in advance, as opposed to just adding spices to a dish as you’re making it, you’ll have a little jar with which you can now have a real nice way to impress people. No one is impressed with individual spices. Everyone is impressed with a jar of homemade za’atar. Well, you won’t be, because you’re going to make it and it’ll be old hat then.
Advent has begun. Every single day a Christmas activity must occur. I’m currently making cinnamon and clove scented pinecones. They’re sitting on the stovetop making the kitchen smell so wonderful. I also made cinnamon ornaments. Lots of cinnamon here. Also on the agenda is getting our Christmas tree from the wilderness, paper snowflakes, watching He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special, talking a walk to peer at fancy Christmas light displays in a fancy neighborhood, etc. I’m not in the mood to make Christmas cookies this year. Not like last year. I’m sure it’ll hit at some point, but nothing much this year. I might have gone overboard last year. I am going to make some sort of toffee concoction for my department’s Christmas party at work on Wednesday. Toffee almond salted something. It’s a homemade candy competition and I better freaking win. I should have made it this weekend because I tried making it last night and all was going well in the pot until it just separated and then it crystallized and now I have like one more chance to try it and I’ll probably ruin it again and cry.

roasted tomato mackerel with pickled jalapeños

My tomato plants suck. Or I suck. I don’t know what I’m doing. Watering too much, not enough, not feeding them enough, feeding them too much, no clue. One has crinkled brown leaves with blotchy looking tomatoes. Another only has a few tomatoes on it. Two others are small and spindly. And my zucchini plants have this horrid white mold on the leaves. I breathed it in yesterday and felt like I was going to die. Good riddance, I’m sick of zucchinis anyway. But I don’t know how to cut them back without dying of mold ingestion. Buying tomatoes at Whole Foods for this recipe pained me. Pained me. But holy crap are they good. Hey, the jalapeños are mine! I’ve got so many! And they’re so spicy. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking with this recipe. I can’t handle heat.
I just found out last week that Biggest Loser won’t have a fall season this year. What am I supposed to do. I already gained an hour of my life back when they dropped last season down to one hour and I wasn’t happy about that. I’ve had Tuesdays free since whenever the last season ended and now I’m going to continue that through till like January? wtheck. Well, not really true – I like MasterChef. It’s so stupid. WalMart is the official grocer of the show. The hosts go on and on about how beautiful WalMart’s USDA Choice steaks are. I want to kick the TV. I need to watch PBS cooking shows. I’m so f-ing sick of regular TV and their snappy editing where I don’t learn anything. I’m going to watch Simply Ming. I’ll learn about potstickers. And all about what a giant douchebag he is.

watermelon rind pickles

Watermelon rind pickles. I am so trendy. A freaking hipster. I’ve even been wearing my dark-rimmed glasses the past week. (My contacts were digging into my eyeballs and oh yeah I forgot to order more.) Get ready, I’ll be getting thick, blunt bangs and a sleeve tattooed. Reading ‘zines and seeing shows. Right. My ‘zines are National Geographic and Smithsonian. I’m no hipster. I’m like a freaking pioneer. Though I’m not sure of what proportion of progressive to historic. Equal parts both? Making butter from raw cream? Olde tymey yet so cutting edge? So yes, I’ve taken the dive into pickling. I have a feeling I might have to get into other forms of preserving, what with more apricots than I know what to do with. The only thing is that I’m kind of lazy and canning feels like it’ll be more of a process than it really is and it takes me a while to get motivated enough to set it all up and start. These pickles had been crowding the fridge in my giant Dutch oven, waiting to be canned, for way longer than I’d planned… it was really annoying, actually.
Oh hey, it’s July. I hope I am making the most of this summer. I’ve hiked rim to rim to rim, backpacked in the mountains to escape like 110 degree heat, been biking to work most days, pranced around in my bathing suit in my backyard, planted a lovely little vegetable garden, taken after dinner barefoot walks, been to baseball games, eaten gobs of ice cream, and gotten disgustingly sweaty running during my lunch hours and simply blotted myself off with paper towels before going back to work. Then hung my sopping running clothes about my desk to dry. I am the best coworker.

curry apricot relish

Am I allowed to eat just fruit in the summer? Fruitarian? Good, thanks. Because that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing the past couple weeks. Colorado cherries and apricots, nectarines, peaches, blueberries, blackberries, watermelon, um I’m gonna barf. Those cherries are especially going to get the best of me. I CAN NOT STOP WITH THEM. I’ll look down at my little bowl full of pits and stems and be genuinely shocked.
Because of the 4th of July, my CSA delivery moved back to the Monday before. That means that I’m going to be getting whole new bags of apricots and cherries a couple days sooner and I kind of panicked when I looked at how many apricots I had left. I considered canning them. Pickling. Dehydrating. Grilling. Desserting. Something. But decided to make a relish of sorts. It was tempting to make another fruit salsa, as I do have quite the affinity for them. But curry was calling to me. And, while salsa could probably be called a relish, it doesn’t work the other way around. So, yes, it’s a fruit relish.

butter

omg. I think I might need to become Amish. Or a sister wife. Quit my job, forget my ambitions, forgo my goals, and live like it’s 1842. Some generically old date. I’ll garden, preserve, pickle, smoke, dry, cure, take my turn at animal husbandry… yeah, and churn some freaking butter. With my handheld antique butter churn. Boy is it cute.
Too lazy to ⌘T my way to finding out if I mentioned this in my last blog post; I just started a raw milk share from Ebert Farms (careful, there’s a cow mooing noise on that page. Horrible.). Last time I made whipped cream with the cream. Dangerous. Gone in one serving. This time I decided to make butter. I have some long dead distant relative’s old butter churn that’s just like half-assed decoration in my kitchen and I decided to put it to use. You can use a hand mixer, but pff (no, don’t worry I will support your use of a hand mixer if you don’t just, ya know, have a butter churn lying around). *Update: my favorite friend Samantha and my fellow blogger bud Danielle from Paring Down Looking Up both mentioned that you can just shake the shit out of cream in a (sterilized, of course, if it’s raw cream – let’s be safe here) mason jar.

roasted poblano pork burgers with pipián

Oh hi! Hi!! I’m back from the Southwest. What a freaking trip. I can’t believe that I was waffling on it. Yeah, 10 days was a long time; I’m such a homebody. If I could have brought my cats along I would have been 100% happy. Hiker cats. But wow was it worth it. Now, I am obsessed with ancient Puebloan Indians. And the Fremont Indians. OBSESSED. I want to start growing heritage varieties of corn. And squash. And beans. And just to diversify my Native peoples interests a bit, all manner of ancient potato varietals. And more importantly, I want to scout out ruins and petroglyphs and pottery. All off the beaten path. Bushwhacking (cactus whacking?) please. I found this woman’s blog and we followed her instructions to this one hike up the Vermillion Cliffs near Kanab, UT (not the ones in AZ). Easily the most wonderful hike I’ve ever done – it was full of petroglyphs and pictographs and dinosaur prints, not to mention gorgeous red rock cliffs. Oh yeah, and lots of mountain lion poop. EEK.
Needless to say, I’m in the mood for Southwestern-y food. Loosely defined. I kept wanting to pick cactus leaves (leaves?) and bring them back to our little condo and cook them. Instead we ate out like every night. Barf. I can not handle that. My stomach feels so terrible doing that so often. It didn’t help that one of the people we were with has megasweettooth. And if someone says “ice cream!”, I can’t help myself. So much ice cream that week. I have megasweettooth, too… Coming home means that I can get back into the swing of cooking all of my meals. God I love that. And what a welcome surprise it was to come home to all sorts of produce in my (completely overgrown with weeds) garden! Arugula, mesclun greens, baby swiss chard (too big to be microgreens), radishes and their greens. So wonderful. I’m concerned about all the peppers I planted… I have a bad feeling I may have picked any little seedlings when I’ve weeded. I think the dirt I got from the fix and flip house two doors down was completely full of weeds. Duh, I guess. So the garden has been absolutely ridden with weeds and I’ve been trying to pull them all to give the little veggie seedlings a fighting chance, but I’m afraid I may have picked the pepper seedlings, since they’re kind of indistinguishable. Not sure. They do take a long time to sprout, but ugh. I’ll probably have to buy plants.

steamed artichokes + bagna cauda

I feel like I might be the last person in the food blogosphere to get on the bagna cauda bandwagon. And probably the artichoke bandwagon. Not that I haven’t had artichokes before, but gasp! I’d never made one. I feel like such a fraud. Allow me to try to redeem myself with this post, even though steaming an artichoke is like the least interesting way to make one. Sigh. GIVE ME A BREAK.
I’m watching a Nova on “Why Ships Sink”. Why do people go on cruises? They’re disgusting. They’re like my nightmare vacation. My anything nightmare. Fat people. Trashy people. Umbrella drinks. Being stuck in a hotel… because it’s just a giant floating hotel. Sick. Oh honey, I have an idea for a vacation! Let’s pay hundreds of dollars to go someplace where we can sit on our asses, eat mountains of food, watch movies, and be in wonderfully close quarters with other fats – hopefully ones wearing American flag shorts and bejeweled crew neck sweatshirts! Speaking of vacations, my dad has finally started talking about going to South America. I’ve been nagging him for years that we need to go abroad to hike/explore. There is an amazing amount of places and things to see in the US, but I’m dying to go to other countries. I’ve only been to Ireland and it was wonderful. I closetly dream of living there some day.

green curry salmon with kiwi salsa

Trying desperately to pry myself away from obsessing over another ethnically accurate meal, I instead managed to produce some sort of dreaded fusion cuisine. Totally don’t care. At least I didn’t make mac and cheese-filled potstickers. Plus, kiwi salsa? You know I have an affinity for fruit salsas, and this one is no exception. I mulled over somehow incorporating coconut milk, which if you’ve got a genius idea, I’d encourage and like to hear about it. I saw some recipe that puréed kiwis with coconut milk, but that seemed a shame. Then I considered poaching the salmon in coconut milk, but ohhh the crispy skin (bacon of the sea). I dunno, sometimes I want to mash together every possible delicious flavor that I think would go well together. Best to just step it back. Like that dumb jewelry rule for ladies that I consistently flout.
I got a cold the other night. Started with that nasty drip burn in the back of my throat, then an achy neck. I felt kinda junky the next day, just real droopy and achy. But lo and behold, the following day? Good as new. I can’t definitively say any reason, I suppose, but I’m putting my money on eating so freaking well this past month. I’ve noticed in general that my cold frequency has gone way down since I started eating paleo, but duration is one thing that’s really easy to notice. I distinctly remember being out of commission for like a week with colds that I used to get back when I lived in Boston. So.awesome. I’m totally on a Whole 30 high. Probably like those fats on The Biggest Loser feel after eating well (questionable – Jennie O??), exercising the crap out of themselves, and getting off all of their meds. I think I should set a goal to become a trainer on that show. Or gain 200 pounds and use my charming personality to gain a spot on it.

cuban pork roast + mojo and chimichurri

It’s been a very garlicky weekend. I’m sure I smell great. It’s also been a very Latiny weekend, filled with yuca, chorizo, cilantro (homemade) mayonnaise, mojo, chimichurri, lime, guacamole, plantains, jicama, burro bananas, and of course, this pork. And then there was the decidedly very down home Americana activity of smoking bacon. My lord I love our smoker. Waiting for the pork belly to defrost, then cure, then smoke was 100% worth it. Holy crap. Let the bacon eating commence! Duh, already started. Garlic and applewood smoke. The smells of a very productive, delicious weekend.
I’m a little wary that this dish is just a liiiiiittle too similar to my carnitas post. Not to knock the Cubans (they should be knocked on about everything else except food), but this is a citrusy, crispy, slow-roasted hunk of pork… just, there are no mountains of lard. Which is good because since doing the Whole 30 I’ve been struggling to keep my jars of animal fats filled. Maybe I should get around to clarifying all the butter I have lying around. But really, this is a different dish from carnitas. It’s incredibly lime-y and garlicky and smidge oregano-y.

yogurt marinated lamb + cucumber mint salad

What a gorgeous Memorial Day weekend we had here. In fact, it’s just been getting increasingly gorgeous! I can’t get enough of it! I know that it’s been over a week since Memorial Day weekend, but I’ve been so busy launching my new company. This recipe has sorrowfully been floating around, waiting to be written about. The pictures longingly waiting to be processed, cropped, and uploaded. Because it’s just that wonderful. I’ve posted lamb and spiced yogurt before and I will keep doing it. They’re both utterly magical components that are just that much more magical when eaten together.

Remember how I was excited to continue making salads? I’ve done good! This chopped cucumber mint salad is mostly raw vegetables with some grilled eggplant thrown in, too. It’s wonderful. And the recipe makes so, so much. I gleefully ate it for every meal the next couple days. And I’ve got another salad in the works for you too. It’s the summer of Julie!

easy chicken salad with truffle mayo

Still riding my high horse from Easter Sunday, where I no-problem whipped up a delicious mayonnaise for our deviled eggs, I was itching for a reason to make more mayo. This chicken salad recipe is really more of a starting off point than a full-fledged recipe. I used an already-cooked rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. They’re a great way to save time when you’re pressed for it. On Wednesdays, Whole Foods has a sale on their chickens, so if I’m going to buy a prepared meal, it’s a good option to do it then. Usually I’ll make just a side of vegetables to go along with the chicken, but it was fun making this salad.

I know truffled things are kind of 2008, but I’m still super into them. It’s probably one of my most favorite flavors. Truffle oil is the poor man’s way to have a glimpse at that wonderful flavor. Not that truffle oils are all that cheap. Some are pretty darn expensive. I’ve never bought one of those, so I don’t know how it compares to the least expensive ones. But this mayo was really good, so whatever. I’ll try not to think about how much better it would be if I had gotten a higher end oil.

yucatecan country style pork ribs with pickled onions

I thought long and hard about what I wanted to eat the night before my half marathon. Carbo load with some pasta? I was nervous to do something like that in case I ate too much or it disagreed with me or what have you. I figured that I’d just make something I would normally eat (I mean, I’d run 11 mile training runs with no real thought on food). I did up the carb content, though. I served this dish with tostones (ooh those plantains again!) and arepas. I would rather eat arepas than pasta ANY day. They’re Venezuelan corn cakes, essentially. Oh yum.

The half marathon was brutal. We were running into gusting wind the whole second half of the race. It killed me. Cars get horrible gas mileage when you’re driving into the wind. Same freakin’ thing here. So, I don’t know if I ate the right thing. Maybe pasta would have powered me through. I also don’t think I ate a big enough breakfast. Ugh, so complicated. I averaged 10 minutes per mile. So much slower than I was aiming for. I was doing about 9:30 minute miles on training runs. I was hoping that I could do low 9 minutes for the race. Darn.

salmon with creamy roasted poblano sauce

This is another one of those “I can’t wait to grill!” dinners that got thwarted. I woke up on Sunday morning with a warm breeze blowing through the bedroom window. Saturday had been about 80 degrees. Sunday progressed a beautiful day until around 11:30am when the wind started howling and black clouds started rushing in from the mountains. Then it rained. Then it wintry mixed. Then it snowed. And I lost my interest in grilling. But that’s okay, because heck, baked salmon is nothing to sniff at. And even if it was, this sauce is so subtle and delicious, it wouldn’t matter.
If you’ve never roasted your own peppers before, now’s a great time to try it. It’s incredibly easy. I’m not sure it’s always cost effective – sometimes fresh red peppers are really expensive and a jar of marinated roasted red peppers might be cheaper. But you can roast all kinds of peppers! The roasted poblano peppers here make a wonderful, rich base for this creamy sauce. You can roast them a few different ways. If you have a gas stove, you can do it right on that burner flame. If, like me, you have an electric stove (something I used to think would be the death of me if I ever got stuck with one, but now am quite ambivalent about), then the broiler is the way to go. I chose to not put my oven rack in the closest position to the broiler. That way I got the peppers charred, but at a little bit slower time, so the peppers were more roasted through.

pork chops with cherry rhubarb chutney + mustard greens + herbed roasted sweet potatoes

You probably think I have an obsession with sweet potatoes. I think I might have an obsession with sweet potatoes. I almost didn’t include them in the recipe because I’m getting embarrassed with how often I post them. I swear I don’t eat them every day. But this recipe isn’t about the sweet potatoes. It’s about pork chops and delicious chutney, and mustard greens too. It’s getting to be warm and spring like and rhubarb is one of those quintessential early spring vegetables, along with asparagus and peas. I might have jumped the gun a bit on rhubarb here – the stuff I found at my grocery store didn’t look the best and it was stupid expensive. Still, I got it in my head to use rhubarb because I want it to be spring and $6.99 per pound be damned.


I had a wonderful, lazy Sunday late afternoon making this dinner. I did all my prepping and took my time with making the chutney and took lots of stress-free pictures. That is, until America’s Next Great Restaurant came on. I had tried to time everything so I could watch that stupid show while eating, but it didn’t work. So now you know about my dedication to not only Biggest Loser, but another NBC product placement-laden television show. I like food and I like exercising and I like shows that revolve around them. And I don’t like waiting until the following day and watching it on my computer. I like to watch it on TV. It’s like I’m 65.

mini spanish burgers with manchego + garlic aioli

My tapas parties in the past have become something of legend, amongst Joe and me. They weren’t really parties, because we never thought to invite anyone, but still. I’d spend most of the day make tapa after tapa – patatas bravas, chicken and ham croquettes, roasted eggplant dip, potato and leek tortilla, honey almond cakes…. it was an ordeal. A wonderfully delicious ordeal! I keep meaning to have another one, and to actually invite some friends over. But until that time, I’ve settled for less extravagant tapas dinners. This time, the focus was these little, easy mini burgers topped with a few slices of aged manchego cheese and some homemade garlic aioli. I also made some quick roasted asparagus and sautéed mushrooms.

Making aioli or homemade mayo can be a trialing event. I don’t make it very often, so I’m always a little out of practice when I set out to make it. This time was no exception. I actually thought it hadn’t emulsified and gave up all hope, but when I looked at it a bit later saw that it had mysteriously thickened. Hmm. Works for me! If you’ve never made aioli or mayo before, you’re in for a treat. It’s so much better than store bought mayonnaise. Hopefully you won’t have trouble getting the emulsification, but if you do, there are ways to save it. I’ve read a few different ways, but the one that’s worked for me is to whisk another room temperature egg yolk, then slowly add the broken mayo to it. I’ve also found that a hand mixer fitted with the whisk attachments is better than a blender or food processor. (I initially forgot that and used a blender, which was why I think it didn’t properly emulsify at first.) You can also hand whisk!

chimichurri beef lettuce wraps

This is kind of a lazy day recipe. Well, meant to spice up a lazy day recipe. We’ve all got those, “ugh, what the heck am I going to make” dinners. For me it usually ends up as burgers with bacon and sweet potato fries. Now, I know that’s nothing to gripe about, but sometimes I just need something a little different. I thought making a chimichurri sauce would be fun, and heck, instead of burgers, how about lettuce wraps? I love lettuce wraps.

There are a million and one recipes for chimichurri, and I’m by no means attached to one. But basically, it’s just parsley, garlic, oil, and vinegar. You can take it from there. I added in onion this time (a bit too much actually), and red pepper flakes are a must. Paprika is a great spice to add and you can also add in cilantro, but be aware that some people find this blasphemous, as it’s not traditional. Pff, whatever. Try experimenting with the level of vinegar. That’s certainly the most overpowering aspect of chimichurri. I start on the low side and add little bits at a time until it’s the right strength.

tilapia with grapefruit beurre blanc + sautéed mushrooms

Okay, so I got a new, wonderful camera for Christmas and I’m still trying to figure things out. I can’t seem to get a good white balance in my dim-as-all-hell kitchen. I figured, eh, I’ll just fix it in Photoshop. Unfortunately, I had a heck of time getting them to the right color, so all my photos look vaguely retro. I wish it was intended, but it’s not.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to eat more fish. For some reason I always shove fish to the back of the recipe line. This recipe was a huge hit, and I’m already planning on making fish again to use up the leftover beurre blanc, so I’m succeeding at that resolution just nicely! The beurre blanc makes use of in season grapefruit, which seems to be on sale at at least one grocery store every week, so take advantage. The original recipe called for endive and shiitake mushrooms. I just used regular white mushrooms that were on sale, and I forgot to get endive. I used up some leftover greens that I had in the fridge along with this, so feel free to either do that or try sautéing some endive.

turkish chicken kebabs + pomegranate pistachio relish + spiced yogurt

Oh yeah, this recipe is a mouthful to say. It might be best left as a weekend recipe, but if you’re really good at prep work then go for it on a weekday. It’s really not hard – it is just chicken on a skewer after all, but there are a fair amount of components.

I managed to get my work to order Bon Appetit under the guise that we should have magazines that appeal to all interests. No matter that I may be the only one there who reads it, I still count! This month’s issue had a section on spiffing up the lowly chicken and this recipe definitely did the trick. It’s light, yet complex, and fun to eat too. Plus, it was made by the chef at a restaurant that I’ve been to back in Cambridge, MA – Oleana.

For my boyfriend’s birthday, I got him a ridiculous grill. We’ve been using it all the time – such a treat after using a Smoky Joe for years! But if you don’t have a grill, or if it’s too cold and snowy, you don’t have to grill the chicken for this recipe, or make kebabs for that matter. You can broil it, or bake it, or use a grill pan if you’ve got one.

cucumber two ways

The cucumber is kind of a lowly vegetable. It’s a vehicle vegetable, or a garnish kind of vegetable. These two recipes let cucumber play an important role, though. I served both of these together with some chicken for a Greek style meal. They work perfectly together, but also equally well apart. Tzatziki is a simple, yet incredibly delicious, condiment that you’ll always find at Greek restaurants. It’s actually really amazing how a small amount of simple ingredients can make plain yogurt to die for.

Cucumber also does great when married with other vegetables in a chopped salad. It’s has a nice in between texture – not crunchy, but not mushy. This particular salad, or salsa as the original recipe calls it, is a great side dish or topper to meat. It’s so good, I found myself eating it by the heaping spoonful while waiting for my chicken to cook. I think the key is to slice your red onion as thin as you can so that its flavor really seeps into the whole dish. It also mellows out too. I’m a little averse to eating a thick slice of red onion on a sandwich (gives me a mysterious headache), but if they’re sweated a little it somehow becomes perfect.

chipotle chicken + salad with honey lime dressing

Even though a snow storm is just as likely as a pleasant sunny day, I can’t help but try to will the weather to warm up permanently with some summery food. I’m all but done with the heavier foods I love in the winter – squash, stews, casseroles, warm salads…and I just want to eat crisp veggies, light sauces, and lots of fresh herbs.

Mexican food in general is a cuisine that I pretty much shun until the temperature gets above 60. I’m never ever in the mood for it until warm weather sets in. So here is a great inaugural dish. The spicy, smoky chipotles go great with loads of cilantro. The chicken could easily be swapped for any other kind of meat or fish. And you can cook those meats in any way you’d like – bake, broil, roast, grill. The sauce can be put on after cooking or before cooking. If you really like some spice, double the chipotle pepper amount!