dragonlady7

I had a weird moment just now... my " key kept writing some weird character. After a while I noticed the little flag in the upper right of my menu bar. Instead of being a little American flag, or a black rectangle with the white letters DV on it (for the Dvorak keyboard layout I use when torturing myself), it was a weird flag. Somehow, I switched my keyboard layout to Czech. Go fiture.

Anyway. That's not what I was going to write about. I was going to write about the eatin's I been cooking up lately.

In case I hadn't mentioned, Dave and I have the house to ourselves this week. So I've been cooking without fear of intruding on the kitchen of another woman-- that woman is living it up in San Diego at the moment, and cares not one whit how I manage the foodstuffs. (It's not that she's minded before, but she's used to managing it, and when you have two managers, it's very, very difficult to keep things straight. Especially when one of them is too shy to tell the other one that she'd already planned on meatloaf for next week, using a different recipe.

Anyhow. Coming into my own, I've been enjoying having a kitchen to myself, and have been celebrating accordingly. What follows are the last three recipes I made, from various sources. :)

Saturday I made burritos. Burritos, though I be the whitest of white girls, are childhood comfort food for me. Why? My mother, whose most recent immigrant ancestors got off the boat in 1640, is a Spanish teacher, and has been studying Carribbean and Central American cooking to spice up her classes. This is her burrito recipe, and she has been known to make it for all of her students, in an electric frying pan, in her classroom. Yes-- burritos for 200. She is a woman full of love, is all I can say.

Mama's Beef and Bean Burritos
(very quick, very easy, relatively cheap.)

1) Meat.

Brown about a pound of hamburger. Lean is good, but if it's not so lean, cook up some more, and then drain the fat thoroughly. If you want to brown some onions or garlic in there as well, go right ahead; it doesn't matter much. Quantities are flexible; double or halve the recipe as you like.
When the meat is browned, add a whole container of salsa. If you're a normal human, make it medium salsa. Tostitos is decent. I use Wegman's.
If you're crazy, use hot salsa. Don't bother with mild salsa; it's just ketchup.

That's the meat. It's tastier than it sounds.

2) Frijoles Refritos: Refried Black Beans.

Don't ask me why they're called refried. I only fry 'em once. Maybe I'm just white like that. No, do NOT substitute those canned refried beans you can get. God only knows what those are, and these are dead easy.

Open two cans (15 oz?) of black beans. You can get 'em in the Goya aisle, or you can get 'em generic. You can even buy them dried in a bag and follow the soaking instructions if you're CRAZY.
Drain the beans.
Dump them into a large bowl. Add 2 T of butter. Soft butter is easier, but it's not important; hard butter will shred.
Using a large, sturdy fork (a normal eating fork is fine, just make sure it's not a cheapo bendy one), mash the beans against the walls of the bowl, scraping all the beans off the bottom and making the bowl all black and mushed. Make sure to mix the butter in there. Drag the mashed beans across the bottom to make sure you got all the loose ones. Be nice and thorough. This is fun for working out aggressions if you're a really sick person like me. (*squish* Take that, Mr. Wouldn't-Hire-Me! Mua ha ha!)

Cut up an onion and saute it in a frying pan with 2 T of butter. (A medium onion will do fine.) Once the onion's softened, add the mushed-up beans. Cook them a little while-- doesn't need to be long, just until they're sort of bubbly and heated-through really well.

Add 1 of those little cans of tomato paste (6 oz?) to the beans once they're hot. Mix it up thoroughly, until it's all a fairly uniform red pasty consistency. Heat through.

You're done.
Serve in wheat tortillas. Top with shredded cheese, sour cream, salsa, a little lettuce if you like.

Variations-- use strips of chicken instead of hamburger. Cut onion and green pepper into strips, brown them separately, and serve them as an additional filling. Ta-daa! Fajitas!

Last night I made something entirely new. This is a little more challenging, in that it involves tahini. I had to ask three people what tahini was and where I could find it in the grocery store. The first lady didn't know what the hell she was talking about; I just figured she would because she was in the health food section. It goes to show you, even knowledgeable-sounding people who appear to be of the proper demographic may not have a freaking clue about tahini.

This is from a cool little cookbook Dave's mom has, called Healthy Cooking For Two (Or Just You), by Frances Price, R.D. -- the publisher says they have a website at www.rodalecookbooks.com, which is impressive given the publication date of 1995...
It's low-fat, low-hassle, small-serving-size recipes, but Dave actually sat down and read through it and chose this one, and didn't realize until after he'd eaten two helpings that it's vegetarian, too. So, that says something about the cookbook.
She presents the recipes in a really cool format-- in columns, so that you can either follow the 2-serving or 4-serving recipe easily. I'm just going to tell you the 4-serving one, and tell you that what I actually did was triple the 2-serving recipe in everything except noodles because I wanted them extra-vegetabley.
These come out really tasty, but kind of pasty-- I'd recommend eating them warm, though the book says warm or cold.

I'm not duplicating her cool format. I'm just narrating.

Spicy Sesame Noodles

8 ounces spaghetti -- cook according to package directions.

Make the dressing: 1/4 cup water, 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 2 tablespoons tahini, 1 tablespoon rice vinegar, 1/4 tsp red-pepper flakes (optional).

Prepare 3/4 cup sliced mushrooms, 2/3 cup diced red or green pepper, 1/2 cup sliced celery, 2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger, 2 cloves crushed garlic.
In 1 tablespoon canola oil, cook the mushrooms, pepper, celery, and ginger for 3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook and stir for another minute. Add the dressing mixture and cook until it begins to bubble and becomes smooth.

Pour over the pasta and toss well.

The recipe also gives the nutrition facts at the bottom, and has a little anecdote at the top. I like the anecdotes in the book, and all the little tip boxes-- she's a dietician, and so addresses myths and facts about healthy eating and so on in amusing little sagas like Fear of Frying.

I'm not usually a health-food person. So I'm going to counterbalance the above recipe with the one I made tonight, but have sitting in the fridge to cook tomorrow.

This is from the unparallelled masterwork of niche cookbooking: Dinosaur BarBQue: An American Roadhouse.
Dinosaur is a biker bar. It's a Southern Pit BBQ biker bar. In Syracuse, NY, with a branch in Rochester.
I've been to both locations. Yes, bikers actually go there. It's really, honestly, truly a biker bar. In both places.
However, it's also heavily frequented by yuppies. Why? The food is freaking gourmet comfort food. How awesome could it possibly be? Oh. Oh, awesome. I assure you.

The cookbook is amusing. It's lavishly illustrated with color photos, of the food, of the restaurant, of the staff and customers in action, of the live blues bands that play the bar, and with photographs of the tattoos of the staff.
it's also liberally sprinkled with quotations from the bathroom graffiiti.

It's trying a bit too hard, but the recipes are pretty darn good, so we forgive them. This book is by John Stage, and is from Ten Speed Press.

This particular recipe, I have not tasted yet. But it has been fun to make, and has a good name. I'm also not copying this one over directly, I'm just telling you how to make it. You'd have to see the cookbook to see how cute the layout is. And how awesome the photo looks.

Not Your Mama's Meatloaf

Preheat oven to 350. Swirl 2 Tbsp olive oil in a hot skillet. Cook 1 1/2 cups finely diced onion, 1 cup finely diced green pepper, and a pinch of salt and pepper until soft. Add 1 tablespoon minced garlic and cook a bit longer. Put into a large bowl with 1 1/2 pounds ground beef and 3/4 pound bulk sweet Italian sausage. Mix well.
Wet 5 slices soft white bread (I got the White Trash kind that's so good for Fluffernutters... mmmm...) and then squeeze them dry. Chop into small pieces, such as they are (I just wound up with chunks of goo-- maybe my bread was too soft) and throw into the bowl. Pour in 3/4 cup Mutha Sauce * and sprinkle in 2 tsp chili powder, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper, and 2 eggs. Mix it all up with your hands really well.

Press into a loaf pan (I didn't have one big enough so I used two. I'll let you know if that makes it burn up or dry out). Top with another 1/2 cup of Mutha Sauce*.
Bake for 1 1/2 hours in preheated 350-degree oven. Take it out and let it set 20 minues. Serve with Mutha Sauce* as gravy.

That claims to be 6-8 servings. I'll let y'all know.

* Mutha Sauce

This is Dinosaur's BBQ sauce. They have their own brand. They bottle it and sell it as Sensuous Slathering Sauce, for ribs. You can get it at Wegman's. It's close enough.

For those of you without Wegman's... Well, it's basically The Ultimate BBQ Sauce. Dave made a big batch when we lived in Westchester, and it took him All Day.
(Well, OK. It takes Dave All Day to make ramen, too. He's that kind of cook.)
A reasonable substitute would probably be normal BBQ sauce, cut with ketchup, lit up a bit with Tabasco. But Mutha Sauce is really good. I could just eat it with a spoon. So, I'll have pity and put the recipe in.

Mutha Sauce

Cook until golden: 1 cup minced onion, 1/2 cup minced green pepper, 1 seeded and minced jalapeno pepper in 1/4 cup of vegetable oil.
Add 2 Tbsp minced garlic and cook 1 minute more.

Add in 1 can (28 oz) tomato sauce.
2 cups Heinz ketchup
1 cup water
3/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cayenne pepper sauce (Frank's is a good local brand)
1/4 cup spicy brown mustard
3/4 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1 Tbsp chili powder
2 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp ground allspice

Bring to a boil, then simmer 10 minutes at lower heat. Let cool, pour into a container, and use in EVERYTHING henceforth.

It's really good, as you can tell from the ingredients. Apparently if you want you can add 1 Tbsp of something called Liquid Smoke at the end, if you want, but I dunno what that is and think it sounds scary.

So. That's my little epic saga about food. I like food. Food is good. :)