Pancake heroism

Pancakes are a new love in my life, but only to order. Try as I might to make them at home, I'm not having much luck.

Sadly, this was the case even when I tried to mix it up with some ricotta and fruit.



I gave these ricotta pancakes a whirl with some market fresh ricotta and extra raspberries, and all was well on paper. Looked good. Added Cool Whip (v good).

Yet, ultimately meh. I don't understand this. Whenever I order pancakes for breakfast, it's sweet fluffy goodness, but at home it's.....[deflating sound].

Intending to persevere this week with a few new recipes and mixes, but until then you have defeated me once more, oh unknowable pancake universe.

Silverlake breakfast

Q. What washes down a bottle of cheap wine and birthday cupcakes?



A: Sunstreaked omelette and sweet potato fries from Dustys in Silverlake!

Cheesy, carby goodness.

Finally

I finally caved, and tracked down one of the Twitter trucks.

If you're going to track a food source down via the internet like some kind of demented hipster scavenger hunt, better make it a good un.

And what's better than a giant dollop of ice cream sandwiched between two giant chewy cookies?



Cheers, Coolhaus truck! I forgive you for setting up in a spot with no. parking. for. miles. I feel cooler already.

First attempt at homemade pizza

My GOD I've been missing me some carbs. Hence, homemade pizza.



The star of the show here was garlic and herb refridgerated pizza dough from Trader Joe's. SO doughy, chewy and good.

I topped with some zesty pizza sauce (made from scratch, pat on back, pat on back), a sprinkle of parm (really didn't want it too cheesy), spinach, buttloads of garlic (technical term), a few mushrooms and some market fresh ricotta (the blobs).

I've never worked with fresh pizza dough before and found it a bit unruly, so ended up making two slightly oddly shaped pizzas, but my god they were good. I shared one with Joe's sister Jenna who's visiting us at the moment, and divided out the extra slices for lunch and snacks. It felt so good to have a comfort food on hand with fresh yummy ingredients. Definitely one to repeat.

PS. My Halloween Hitchcock tribute

The things that we eat and do not blog

The last week somehow has prompted a bit of a spiral. Here are some things I have eaten since Halloween and failed to photograph.

Jack in the Box burger and fries
Several large bagels with lox + cream cheese
4-5 slices of pizza. Large
Iced cookies
Snickerdoodle cookies
Nestle Crunch mini Halloween bars. Many
Energy bars as supplement to breakfast every day
All you can eat sliders + spanish rice

Mitigating circumstances:
Crazy blackouts in my building that went on for over 24 hours, making cooking impossible
One of the worst colds I've had for years. Cue mantra 'stave a fever, feed a cold' playing on loop in my head
Halloween

Decision
Although this has not been my proudest week, I can feel myself coming out of it. Luckily my cold only prevented me from running for a day or two and shouldn't hold me back from the 18 miler training run this weekend.

Although the temptation is to take this bad behavior and ride it out for as long as it can go, I'm starting to stabilize. The Halloween candy has thinned out and no longer haunts me. The power is back on and I'm all stocked up on healthy fruits and veg. Joe's sister is in town, so I'm pouring a lot of energy into cooking healthy meals for three. It's all starting to click back into place.

From now on, it's less of this



And more of this



Back on track, baby.

Thai me up! Thai me down!

We celebrated a pre-Halloween night at a haunted house in Pasadena, CA, with a slap-up Thai meal at Saladang.

I haven't eaten my fair share (or anyone else's share) of decent Thai food since we moved to LA, so I was excited to visit this highly recommended eaterie. It was a nice, airy space with high ceilings and a relaxed vibe.

We were all about the food. Starting with the 'Thai Toast'. These were delicious, if sinfully deep fried - they tasted like shrimp toast, but had a mix of meat and came with a nice tangy, delicate cucumber salad.



Pad Thai was a must. We picked the chicken version - HUGE enough to comfortably feed three people and still have a mountain of leftovers to take home:



We also ordered a massive plate of shrimp fried rice to share:



And a red curry with beef. This was the star of the evening! Very creamy, with a delicious coconut sauce. Holy YUM. Shame this was the smallest dish we ordered! We all wanted more.



It felt so good to have some great Asian food again - been much too long!

After the haunted house (hilariously cheesy and fun), I was jonesin for some pre-Halloween chocolate. This little guy pretty much jumped into my hand at a late night Vons run



Let candy season commence!

Pasta methadone

There are certain foods I would never have dreamed of eating a year ago. Tofu is one of these foods.

There's just something I don't trust about tofu. It's not meat. It tries to masquerade as meat, but it's confusing and odd. The texture is odd, that mushroomy smell is odd.

However, I do dream about pasta. Big bowls of creamy pasta. So good, so forbidden, so sorely missed. Therefore, I suspended my no-tofu rule a few months ago to try the Tofu Shirataki noodles, as championed by Hungry Girl.



I was pleasantly surprised by these. They have a very pasta-like consistency, and work really well as a substitute for me. Add in some Laughing Cow cheese, a dollop of sour cream and some chicken/vegetables and voila! Faux alfredo!

The risotto virgin

Risotto is one of those dishes that I've always been a bit intimidated by. I like either quick dishes that are just stir and go, or something that I can plop in the oven and walk away. Watch Jeopardy. Put my feet up until the reassuring oven ping.

However, on Thursday night after a storming eight mile treadmill run I had some leftover chicken and mushrooms that were begging to be used up. I was thinking of a quick mushroom stroganoff, but got a pretty lukewarm response from the boyfriend. Lord knows that no man has final say over my kitchen, but I do my best to please all the people all the time, and so I dug out the Arborio rice decided to scale the risotto mountain.

Ran into a small snag half way through cooking when I realized I didn't have enough chicken stock to complete the recipe. At this point it was do or die, so I was forced to improvise. Luckily , I remembered that I had a lot of chicken noodle soups tucked away in the cupboard, so I ran them through the sieve, and voila - a few cans later I had a sodiumy, but perfectly acceptable substitute.

A LOT of stirring later, and no butter (pat on back), we had our first household risotto:



Broke out the his and hers blue and pink bowls for the occasion. So cute!



VERY filling. Consider the risotto mountain conquered!

Movie snacks - to choc or not to choc?

You tasty little bastards.



So it turns out I have a new weakness. I've never been a real chocolate fiend, but I love, love, LOVE cookies, biscuits, desserts - anything with a crumbly, salty texture and taste. Enter the 'natural', 'healthy' Annie's cookies, which I have been guzzling like a demon.

I need to learn that just because you can buy something in Trader Joes, that is not a license to eat it in fistfuls. Or every time I go to the sink. Or in celebration of every time it's 5 minutes past the hour.

Mindful of this, I tried to neutralize a SMALL handful for a movie snack to see Where The Wild Things Are with a healthy farmers market plum.



Better a slobby, noisy snacker in the darkness than this guy.



PS. Absolutely loved Where the Wild Things Are. Deceptively simple and storybook, but gorgeous and thoughtful. Saw it in IMAX too, which was awesome.

The diet saboteur

What do you do when you're quietly munching on your salad, and your boyfriend is eating THIS in front of you?



For those of you who answered take a bite you are correct! Give yourselves a big round of applause!

Brownies and stirfy (in that order)

Last night's dinner was quick and simple. What do you do when you have buttloads of vegetables to use up and some chicken burning a whole in your fridge?

Quick and easy chicken stir fry with squash and zucchini! Light and delicious.



Served as usual with rice for the Carb Kid, and over salad for me.



Sometimes there is only room for one star in a meal. Last night, the star was dessert. NO PUDGE FUDGE BROWNIES!!



I've been DYING to try these ever since I picked up the mix at Trader Joe's. Every diet blogger I read has tried these at least once - they're low fat (only 110 cals per brownie) and super easy to make - just add vanilla low fat yoghurt and voila! I added an egg white to give them a more cakey texture.

Yummy mix going into the over. Not shown - me shamelessly licking the spoon, then licking the bowl, then calling Joe over to lick the bowl.



35 fragrant minutes later, my apartment smelled like brownies and the no pudge fun could begin!



I'm not much of a brownie expert, but these tasted damn fine to me - especially all warm and gooey straight out of the oven. Pretty fudgey and rich and minimizes the guilt factor - there's six still sitting in my kitchen and I'm not hating having them around, or averting my eyes every time I go in there. I may even have another after dinner tonight with some milk. Take THAT dessert cravings!

The Great Pumpkin!

Being a non-native, I am very easily thrilled by kitschy Americana traditions. My first trip to a pumpkin patch was definitely one of them (after 5 years in the US, how is this my first?)

First, a quick snack to fight off the temptation to munch my way through all the pumpkins like PacMan. My newest energy bar experiment went very well - very rich and chocolatey (almost makes up for the high calorie count)



Then it was off to the patch! Pumpkins, pumpkins everywhere!





There was even a petting zoo! The animals were a little put out when they realized we hadn't shelled out the $4 for grain to feed them. I feel your pain, buddies.





In the end, we picked out an excellent small, fat pumpkin. Joe and I both approved.





BE READY PUMPKIN!!!!! TONIGHT WE CARVE OUT YOUR GUTS FOR OUR AMUSEMENT!!! MUHAHAHAHA!!!!

Urban warrior

Today I listened to a This American Life podcast while shopping at my local farmers market. I'm so middle class!

Today's haul:



Including some fat, delicious sweet potatoes for the latkes I intend to make later this week:



Some strawberries and grapes to feed the insatiable breakfast monster:





And some squash and tomatoes which I'm going to mix up tonight with some chicken for a healthy stir fry (check out my beloved plums peeping out too):





Polished off the rest of yesterday's stew for lunch, and now we're off to the pumpkin patch! So excited!

The comfort (gravy) train rumbles on

Yesterday was one of the first truly chilly days of the season (well, chilly for Southern California). The winds were pretty intense, and drivers were slipping about all over the roads.

It was a great day to be tucked up inside watching Red Dwarf dvds with Joe and the cat. It was also a great day for stew.

I had some leftover beef cubes, and with a little research decided to pay homage to Julia Child with a quick and easy version of bouef boeurginon, but with marsala wine for a little added kick, and cutting down signficantly on the four hour cooking time.

Here it is simmering away and looking autumnal. I threw in some mushrooms and some diced carrots and onions, along with a chopped potato on Joe's request (cue plaintive cry, 'it's not stew without potato!')



My helping with a little piece of bread



Joe's helping with lots o' bread



The stew was thick, rich and very filling. It very nearly cured the dessert craving, although I ended up having a Jello low fat pudding AND a handful of Joe's chocolate popcorn, because, well sometimes I am an unknowable enigma.

Bon appetit Julia!

Comfort food

This blog is truly not intended to be too much of a personal project, at least not intentionally so. I've written personal blogs before, and always wanted to have a tighter focus. I'm self-contained by nature, and feel uncomfortable with too much blah blah me blah blah talk.

However, I don't think it breaks the rules to say that I have a lot on my mind at the moment. With work and personal worries aplenty flooding my thoughts today, I needed the ultimate comfort food.

Hence, it was grilled cheese day in Santa Monica.

This is a combo I've been dying to try since I brought home fresh deli carved chicken.

A thin spread of raspberry preserves



Add the righteous turkey and a few slice of brie (YUM!!!!)



Then about a quarter of a sliced farmer's market apple



Give it a whirl in the George Forman



And you have yourself some ooey gooey goodness. Eaten with my usual salad, and the rest of the apple. Fresh and delicious. The tastes blend just right, and it was the best lunch I've had all week!



One of the things I love about food is the concentration and satisfaction of putting something together and enjoying it. I used to avoid cooking because I hated the process of fussing over ingredients and pots and pans. I thought it was easier to have it all put together for me - now I can't stand the idea of not having a say in what I eat. I literally went to sleep planning this sandwich last night, and while that may seem sad to some, it really helped lighten my mood.

Every day, I love cooking a little more.

Things to do in a blackout

1) Curse SoCal Edison.

2) Light candles.

3) Take romantic candelight photos



4) Take romantic half head candlelight photos of self



5) Try to blind each other with flashlight



6) Take flashlight 'spotlight' photos of boyfriend



7) Thank the lord that you've already cooked and eaten your meal for the evening.



8) Realize how dependent you are on electricity, and slope off to the gym with a handful of cookies, you sadsack,

FINIT