Bacon & Guac Grilled Cheese

Pork Loin Lasagna and Healthy Creamed Spinach

Beet and fennel salad

How did we ever make this - it has beets and it came after the cleanse!

Salmon, butternut squash and dill mac&cheese

Part of the mac and cheese month! Mmm why don't we make this more often?

Hot Chocolate!

This post would make a lot more sense in the fall or winter instead of the spring, especially since both this winter and this spring have been unseasonably warm. But it doesn't matter: on a cold warm, snowy rainy drizzly day, a nice mug of hot cocoa can be just what the doctor ordered.

We had some extra dulce de leche from when we made empanadas. And when life gives you dulce de leche, you make lemonade hot chocolate!

This recipe was pretty rich - it was almost like a drinking chocolate - so you might consider adding more milk.  Or just some churros...

Fish Friday: Deconstructed Sushi

A typical fast Fish Friday:  fresh salmon, served raw, pan fried salmon skin, a ripe avocado, and some brown rice. We serve it with soy sauce with a dangerous helping of wasabi.  Easy, fast, healthy, and delicious!

Even though we occasionally (and with some success) try more complicated dishes and meals, sometimes simple is best.  Like this blog post, for example.

C & D

Pizza Pizza!

Sausage and peppers pizza: see below for our recipe

Elizabeth has weird eating tastes.  She doesn't eat corn (really?) and she doesn't like pizza as much as most Americans do.  The problem isn't that she's not American (she is), but rather that a lot of pizza just isn't that good.  (We're looking at you, Pizza Hut and Domino's.)  Enter our completely homemade pizza.  Well, kinda - the sauce on our first pizza came from a jar, and the cheese and sausage on the 3rd pizza were store bought, but everything else, from scratch.  We promise!  And also, how could you expect us to package our own sausage?  We're still full-time students!  And we don't want to know how the sausage is made!

A little while ago, we bought one of those kits where you can make your own fresh mozzarella cheese.  It's a close call whether it ends up being cheaper to make it ourselves than to buy it from the store, but perhaps we had a stronger sense of ownership in the cheese, making it taste better (maybe the love made it better... wait, of course the love made it better).  For more on the labor theory of value and its applicability to the culinary arts, please see our forthcoming economics blog.

In any case, we decided to take our cheese and make some pizza. Our favorite pizza dough recipe actually makes enough dough for three pizzas, so we made three different pizzas (over the course of several days).

I Scream, You Scream: Ice Cream

For Ben's birthday last year, Elizabeth got him an ice cream maker.  We had been talking about getting an ice cream maker for a while, so we were excited to get this bad boy.

We had a somewhat disastrous first foray into ice cream with an avocado ice cream that didn't initially set (possibly because the core was not fully frozen - yay impatience!) and then froze like a solid block in the freezer.  Also, it tasted kinda bland.

This vanilla ice cream we made, though, was SO rich and creamy, Elizabeth could feel the fat being added onto her Insanity abs.

Fish Friday: Salmon with Lemon Caper Butter, Garlic Asparagus and Basil Couscous

Some point last semester, we decided to eat more fish.  For one, we found that we were eating a ton of beef and chicken, which was getting a little boring.  But also, fish is healthier, and if you saw our earlier series on the cleanse, we begrudgingly care about this.  So we decided, completely coincidentally with Roman Catholic tradition (both of us are Protestants), to make our Friday dinner a fish dish. It was actually the alliteration that berthed Fish Friday; Fish Tuesday just isn't that much fun.

So it's our tradition to go to Whole Foods on Friday afternoons (we're high rollers) to get fresh fish - whatever's on sale - and whip up a new, relatively healthy fish dish. We've had fish and chips, which we pictured earlier, and a whole variet of steamed, grilled, fried, deep-fried fishes, including tilapia, cod, branzini, salmon, tuna and chilean sea bass (for you old timers, the Patagonian toothfish).

This Friday we decided to make some salmon with lemon caper butter, garlic asparagus, and basil couscous.

Chicken Tabaka with Green Bean Borani

Elizabeth found this recipe for chicken tabaka in the Wall Street Journal, so we decided to try it.  We wish we had a more compelling backstory - kinda like the backstory in the actual article involving bribery and dining behind the Iron Curtain - but we don't.  We needed something to eat for Tuesday dinner, and this dish seemed like a winner without too many new ingredients.

Of course, we could lie to you - after weeks of hiking through the thick jungles of Costa Rica, foraging on berries and tree bark, we finally reached our destination: the long-lost Temple of Viastu.  When we arrived, we walked in the foyer and saw a copy of the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal.  In it, we saw the recipe for chicken tabaka and decided to make it when we got home.  Better?

We had never made or even eaten Cornish game hen before, so this was a learning experience for us.  For your convenience, we'll reprint the recipe here (with some modifications) and give our thoughts on the dish afterwards - thanks Wall Street Journal!  (Note: we only used two hens, but we'll post the full recipe that uses 4.)

Eggplant Parmesan

There's nothing like a good sale to prompt attempting a new dish.  We saw eggplant on sale at Kroger at 10 for $10.  Thus we decided to try our hands at a classic, eggplant parmesan.

Fresh out of the oven.

We borrowed from this Food Network recipe - primarily the part where you salt the eggplant slices and let them hang out for an hour.  Instead of the quick marinara in the recipe, we made our own sauce.  We sauteed half an onion, half a yellow bell pepper, celery, and carrots, added it to a couple of cans of diced tomatoes, added some salt, pepper, and olive oil, and simmered it for maybe 20 or 30 minutes.  After that, we stuck the sauce in the blender to make it nice and smooth.  From there, we assembled the final product, layering the sauce with mozzarella, parmesan, and the eggplant slices (which we, of course, breaded and fried).

Gooey, cheesy, and delicious.  The way it should be.

When Ben has had eggplant parmesan in the past, it's frequently been kinda soggy and sad.  This one happily did not fit that description.  The cheese was nice and golden brown on the top, and the eggplant was fantastic.  This one is definitely making it into our dinner rotation - that is, whenever eggplant goes back on sale.

C & D

Adventures with Empanadas

Some of you, especially in our massive fan base in New York, may have heard of Empanada Mama.  When Ben was last in New York, he went to a party that was catered by them.  Most of their food was straightforward, if not tasty, Latino cuisine, but it wasn't until the dessert round that Ben discovered their caramel and cheese empanadas, which were just the best thing ever.*  The host of the party refused to allow anyone to leave until all the empanadas were out of her apartment - Ben was happy to oblige and took as many caramel and cheese empanadas as he could fit into a paper bag.

Crispy, delicious empanadas.

A little while ago, Elizabeth discovered that the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board was celebrating cheese with their blog, whose theme this year was 30 different ways to make macaroni and cheese in 30 days.  First of all, congratulations to the WMMB for a fabulous idea.  Second, there were some pretty awesome recipes featured there (at some point, Ben really wants to try the breakfast mac and cheese).  The recipe that really stuck out, submitted by Always Order Dessert, was the one for guava mac and cheese empanadas.  How could two foods from such different worlds come together in fried doughy goodness?

Was it coincidence that we discovered empanadas we'd like to try months apart?  Ben likes to think it's fate.  Either way, we decided to try our hand at some empanadas of our own.  We had a recipe for the guava mac and cheese empanadas.  We also decided to make some basic shredded beef empanadas, using the filling recipe found here.  And finally, we decided to try to recreate the caramel and cheese empanadas as best as we could.  (For simplicity's sake, we just used the empanada wrapper recipe for the guava mac and cheese empanadas, tripled.)

The guava mac and cheese empanadas were a real winner.  For one, the mac and cheese, made with gruyere, was pretty spot on.  But the combination of guava and mac and cheese worked really well.  Ben used to eat guava paste with queso blanco growing up (because his mom, from Puerto Rico, ate it growing up).  The total package, reminiscent of that except with a flaky crust to boot, was just sublime.

The shredded beef empanadas also turned out well.  We enjoyed these with a bit of guacamole (the remainder of which was annihilated by some friends after a night of drinking), which gave some creamy balance to the salty, savory empanadas.

Sadly, our iteration of the caramel and cheese empanadas was not as successful.  Since we did not have a recipe (we emailed Empanada Mama, but they would only tell him that the cheese used was mozzarella), we had to improvise.  We used a dulce de leche recipe from Alton Brown (Ben's non-mother cooking hero) and added it plus some shredded mozzarella to the empanada shells.  Though all the flavors were definitely there, they just didn't seem to come out right.  We didn't seem to have added enough dulce de leche, but it was hard to add much more without it all escaping before we could seal the empanada.  Maybe it wasn't thick enough.  In any case, we'll try them again soon.

C & D

*That is, until the next time we say the "best thing ever" on this blog.

Tomato, Burrata, and Spinach Salad

Fish Friday: Cod Fish & Chips

Sorry this image is so phallic.

We borrowed the fish recipe from Alton Brown, using some fresh cod.  (Also, we used a Fat Tire from the beer - at some point we'll write an ode to Fat Tire.)

C & D

The Cleanse: Post-Game

What breakfast should really look like: poached eggs,
hashbrowns, sausage, blueberries, and avocado.  Yum.

For 10 challenging days, we took on the (admittedly 3- or 4-week) cleanse, brought to you by Whole Living.  Admittedly, we had to improvise to fit our schedule, but the last 10 days were tough all the same, and it feels good to have our friends meat, gluten, and alcohol back.  Of course, if our plan was just to cleanse for 10 days and then go back to old habits, then why bother with the cleanse?  (Although we gorged on the indulgent breakfast featured on the left). We definitely learned some interesting lessons about food and our eating habits during the cleanse.  First, a winner and loser from the second half of the cleanse:

Winner: avocado-vanilla smoothie.  This was a real crowd pleaser, and definitely something we'll incorporate into our future menus.  It's simple to make and delicious.  What more can you ask for?

We spent the day making dumplings.  We missed you,
pork and gluten.  Don't ever leave us again.

Loser: baked trout with broccoli, apple, and fennel slaw.  It's not fair because 1) we never actually used trout for this dish and 2) we didn't make the slaw dressing correctly, i.e. with actual applesauce.  But life's not fair.  Elizabeth thought there was just too much slaw (note: this is the only time that we thought there was too much food), and was not a big fan of it to begin with.  Ben appreciated the use of fennel, but didn't love the slaw.  The slaw is the real loser here.  We have no problem with baked mahi-mahi or tilapia.

Even though the cleanse is over, we're not going to abandon healthy eating completely.  Indeed, there are several takeaways from the last ten days:

1.  You can take pretty much any vegetable, sprinkle it with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil, and roast for 20-40 minutes, and you'll have something delicious.  We've already done this with Brussels sprouts, and we did it during the cleanse with cauliflower, fennel, and garlic.  We will explore this theory further in the coming weeks.

2. It wouldn't crush us to eat mostly vegetables; it's the idea that we can't eat something - like meat, like chocolate, like caffeine - that really drove us crazy.  Vegetables doused in olive oil and salt and pepper or just pretty simple salads - except for the proportions we didn't feel deprived to eat delicious vegetables.  And we should eat five servings at least a day.  And we will.

3. Elizabeth noticed that this diet make her skin clearer, her eyes brighter and her waistline much thinner.  And she still had energy to start our 100-push-up challenge.  She could really get used to feeling this way and if this diet is the way to do it, well, she'd be pretty stupid not to try to incorporate as much of it into her normal diet and routine as she could stand.

We had some leftover dumpling filling and ran out of
flour for the wrappers, so we made meatballs with the rest.

4. Ben treats hunger pangs differently now.  Before, when Ben got hungry, it was a race to the kitchen (or Asian Express) to get lots of food, and he ate until he was full.  Now, the process is more managed. Hunger pangs can signal hunger, but they also might be the body saying you need water.  Or they could really be nothing.  Either way, the cleanse helped him be a little more patient when hunger arrives and a little more reasonable when eating.

Tomorrow, we're headed to LA and one of our favorite restaurants, Jitlada.  Hopefully we'll take some awesome pictures of the food we get (and the friends we are meeting there, of course).  Can't wait!

C & D

The Cleanse: Day 10 - End of Days, End of Cleanse

Yay - the last day of the cleanse is here?  It's weird because simultaneously it feels like we weren't expecting the final day to come so soon but also that we wouldn't last more than a day on this thing.  We're going to do a roundup of how the cleanse went tomorrow.

Steamed salmon with brown rice.
*Not pictured: a bag of Spicy Thai Kettle Chips.

Today we probably ate more than we should since we are preparing to go on vacation and don't want our fresh produce to go bad.  So for breakfast, we had the steamed salmon.  For lunch, the same chickpea burger with all the leftover greens and leftover peppers, which we roasted.  For dinner, the same shitaakes in parchment but with roasted cauliflower and fennel.  For a snack, we had clementines and another avocado smoothie.  And at the stroke of midnight tonight, we'll both be having pieces of chocolate to end our cleanse.  Ahh it feels like Christmas!

C & D

The Cleanse: Day 9 - Start of Week 3

Last night, Elizabeth had a dream that Ben was out of town, so Elizabeth was having snacks with some new people and her friend, Pauline.  Pauline and Elizabeth told their guests that they would get them dinner and suddenly they're running through a closing Asian market in a white tent, narrowly missing tons of closing doors.  Then they were attacked by mooses.

Anyway, given our abbreviated schedule, we started Week 3 today.  This is significant because it's the return of EGGS!  Eggs are Elizabeth's favorite food.  We added poached eggs (something new to our egg repertoire) to our shiitake mushroom and brown rice dinner for a little extra finger-lickin' good.  Even in future cleanses, Elizabeth may never give up eggs again.  The separation was too hard.

Breakfast was another avocado smoothie.  Delicious again and doesn't even feel like we're cleansing. Lunch was chickpea burgers - yummy, but they feel very healthy.

We continually wonder how much of this cleanse is going to stick after the cleanse is over. Elizabeth is totally for more avocado smoothies, fruit and nut clusters and roasted cauliflower. The rest is a little up in the air.  But now that we're less hungry, and don't think about food all the live-long day, the cleanse actually saves a fair amount of time and stress because we have to plan our meals for the week -otherwise, we'd be shopping constantly.  And we've figured out some cheap ways to continue the cleanse - like the peanut and raisin clusters from yesterday.


C&D

The Cleanse: Day 8 - Hunger Pangs Are Not Controlling Our Lives

Last night Elizabeth had a dream that she ate a piece of chocolate and not only did she feel terribly guilty, but also she was only able to take little tiny bites of the bonbon, and the chocolate was inflaming her mouth and stomach, and it left a bad aftertaste.

It makes a huge difference doing the cleanse with someone else.  (Thanks, Ben!)  His feelings of hatred towards Elizabeth regarding starting the cleanse have mostly subsided.  The 2 pounds he loses per day probably don't hurt either.  We saw an old friend today and she noticed how great we looked.  It also doesn't hurt that the last time she saw us, the semester was ending and we were preparing for finals on a steady diet of Asian Express - now, we are quite well-rested and eat almost nothing but vegetables.

For breakfast, we had the avocado smoothie.  It was just deliciously creamy.  Ben was initially skeptical about the flavor combination of avocado, pear, and vanilla, but it worked quite well.

For lunch, we had the spicy black bean salad.  It wasn't as spicy as Elizabeth had thought it would be, but that's probably good since Elizabeth can't take the heat sometimes.  (Side note: we're planning a pretty awesome trip to Jitlada, our favorite ridiculously spicy Thai place on Saturday.)

For dinner, we had the same meal as yesterday but this time with tilapia instead of mahi-mahi.  The fish we bought actually came as 4 fillets of 3 oz whereas the recipe calls for 4 oz so we each ate 6 oz of fish instead.  We know it's much more than the recipe calls for but Elizabeth is getting a little worried about our rapid weight loss and doesn't think it's too terrible an idea if we just add a few hundred calories here and there to our sub-1,000 calorie diet.

For a snack, we had the fruit and nut clusters.  I think they're actually called fruit and nut balls but we're so immature that we laughed every time we said it.  If you just mix in raisins and peanuts - incidentally the cheapest dried fruit and nut - they taste just like PB&J balls.  Haha, there we go again.

C & D

The Cleanse: Day 7 - Making It Look Easy

While getting pedicures today (note: this, like the cleanse, was Elizabeth's idea), Elizabeth stumbled upon a magazine article discussing Jennifer Hudson's diet strategy and success.  We both had the same idea:  her diet is a piece of cake (Ben could go for a piece of cake) compared to this cleanse.  That being said, having fish on the menu has definitely made sticking with the cleanse significantly easier.

Even though we had leftover miso soup for breakfast, lunch featured a watercress salad with sardines, tarragon, and clementines. We were surprised the sardines weren't dirt cheap but they're actually not that expensive for fish, especially sustainable fish that you can keep in the pantry for whenever.

This is the cauliflower snack that we've had so often. Delish.  This is seriously a snack that is going places.  Move over, popcorn at the movies. Step aside, peanuts and Cracker Jack at the baseball game.  Some other time, Kettle Chips - actually, we'll probably go back to Kettle Chips when this cleanse is over.  But we could see adding a little roasted cauliflower into the rotation.  If there's one thing we've learned in the last seven days, it's that vegetables can be your friend, especially when you have no other choice except to eat nothing (imagine a Brussels sprout pointing a gun at our heads).

Dinner was something of an improvisation.  The recipe called for trout, but we couldn't find any at Harris Teeter when we went so we opted for mahi-mahi instead.  We think it worked well.  We also forgot to buy applesauce for the fennel slaw, so we had to make a bit of a makeshift applesauce using some random internet recipes.  This was probably less successful.  Ben enjoyed the slaw, though found the dressing a bit lacking.  Elizabeth thought the slaw was a little too raw.  Doesn't sound like a keeper.

Given our more recent feelings of success with the cleanse, we think it's actually possible to incorporate some of the objectives of the cleanse into our regular culinary lives.  The cauliflower snack is just one example.  Our meals have usually followed the traditional American approach to plating:  one big piece of meat, some sort of starch, and some vegetables.  But the meals we've prepared on the cleanse have been much more heavily focused on the veggies, and even the meals with fish are veggie-centric.

Will we give up enjoying the occasional rack of ribs?  No.  Is a double helping of macaroni and cheese still in the cards?  Sure.  Will we be going to Fogo de Chao at some point in the next 6 months?  I'd bet on it.  Is asking yourself questions and then answering them kinda douche-y?  Of course it is.  But that doesn't mean that a few tweaks to our everyday meal planning are not in order.

C & D

The Cleanse: Day 6 - The Benefits of Starvation

This is going to be a weird visuals day since we had miso soup for breakfast.  Yes, breakfast soup.  It was quite delicious and hearty but was definitely a strange way to greet the day.  It's no stranger than drinking vegetable smoothies for breakfast.  Besides, weird soon becomes normal on the cleanse - like our constant (normal) hunger and our constant (normal) thinking about food.





On the plus side, we got on the scale and weighed ourselves today.  Elizabeth lost 5 pounds and Ben lost 10.  It might be a little bit of muscle mass for Ben but Elizabeth has no and has never had any muscle mass so she's probably just losing weight.

We better be losing weight since we're only eating about 800 calories a day, even with small cheats.  Small cheats like this green smoothie - which we had leftover from yesterday.  It seems like we're doing the real person's version of this cleanse because something that doesn't seem to be brought up in the reading materials is the possibility of certain foods going bad because you have to buy 10 green onions but only use 2.

The kale salad we had for lunch is below.  This was actually a Week 1 lunch, but we already had the ingredients for it.  This salad was meh, though the dressing was nice enough.

For dinner, we had salmon and bok choy.  Yay for having fish!  It was delicious and beautiful and we really wish we remembered to take a picture of it.

For a light dessert, since we're a little tired of the cinnamon-poached apples, we had a mango salsa, which was basically the salsa we had with the fish, but with a leftover, lonely mango.  See, real people.

Now that fish - actual protein - is back on the menu, Ben is going to try lifting weights again for the first time since starting the cleanse.  We're also thinking about trying the 100-pushup challenge.  We're hoping that the intense and unending hunger pangs won't interfere with attempting actual physical activity.  After flailing around on the tennis court, there's no place to go but up.

C & D