Sticking my neck out

My modus operandi for knit and crochet projects seems to be biting off more than I can chew, usually in the form of enormous blankets that take me months, or even years, to finish. I decided that I should maybe take a different approach and try a few smaller scale projects here and there, especially stash-busting efforts that would slowly nibble away at my modest stockpile of odds and ends.

Way back in June, I mentioned that my goal for the month was to try some amigurumi toward this end. I don’t know if there is a specific definition of amigurumi, but I take it to mean the crocheting of cute, small, and sometimes eclectic items, particularly animals and sometimes objects. I don’t know how small amigurumi is technically supposed to be, but I fell in love with this adorable giraffe, which claims to be amigurumi but is a bit large. Amigurumi or no, I decided I wanted to try my hand at whipping up a stuffed animal in crochet, starting with this one.

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A busy June ahead

June is already here, and it is already shaping up to be a busy and eventful month. May went slowly and quickly at the same time. Initially, I didn’t have a grand plan for a May monthly challenge, but it ended up being a month for wrapping up a ton of projects that we’ve had on our agenda for quite a while. From putting the final touch on our room renovation to installing a spice rack, we made significant and satisfying progress on our to-do list. It’s still half a mile long, but progress nonetheless.

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April wise

As I stated here on the blog a year ago, I really do not care for April Fools Day. I appreciate a clever prank or some witty playfulness now and again, but I feel that some jokes go a little far on this day. Rather than focusing on a negative, however, I’ve decided to take today to begin a new monthly challenge for April, one that I believe is wise and not at all foolish.

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Hello 2014!

I don’t do New Years Resolutions. By now, from reading my blog, you can tell that I’m all about resolving to do new things and setting goals for myself. However, the stigma attached to goals that have to start on January 1 and typically are failed by January 10 makes me unexcited to jump on that bandwagon.

Who doesn’t want to eat better, or get in shape, or get organized, or finally accomplish this thing or that? Those are all great, but most resolutions are begun in haste when January creeps up quickly after Christmas; with little or no planning or preparation before starting these goals, they are bound to fail when they hit the first snag. I prefer to be thoughtful and make a plan with a high chance of success.

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A Holiday Buffet

Today I have a buffet of topics that are cooking at the Taylors’ house this week (and they all, ironically, happen to be food related), so grab a fork and spoon and let’s dive in.

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Ender’s Game

Last night, Bart and I ventured out to find our local movie theater. We only see a movie every month or two in the theater, yet having a theater that we normally go to is, strangely, something that makes me feel really settled in a place.

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Eat-in Challenge: Chicken Pot Pie

I was surprised to  find myself hankering for eating out today. Not just hankering for restaurant food, but mostly interested in the experience of going out and having fun. But we’re still in our Eat-Out Challenge for November, so I’m soldiering on by cooking some great home-cooked meals and trying out some new recipes.

What better way to completely forget about ho-hum hamburgers or burritos than to whip up your own, savory chicken pot pie from scratch? I’ve been thinking about making this since before we moved but haven’t had the opportunity yet. Coincidentally, when I asked Bart what he’d like for me to cook this week, he also suggested chicken pot pie. Well, the people have spoken, so here we go.

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Eat-In Challenge: Huevos Rancheros Divorciados

As you recall, part of November’s Eat-out challenge was trying four new recipes this month. We’ll call that the Eat-In Challenge for November. To start off the month last week, I tried my hand at a dish Bart and I had at a restaurant in Arlington a few months ago but had never made on my own.

I’d heard of huevos rancheros before, but I had never eaten it. I’m not sure why; I’m a gigantic fan of breakfast and of Mexican food, so it’s an obvious win. At this restaurant, I saw that they had not only huevos rancheros on the menu, but they had huevos rancheros divorciados. I’d never heard of this before, but the waitress explained it as huevos rancheros with both red and green sauce. As I am also a gigantic fan of green sauce, I knew I needed to try it. Despite the ominous name, it was quite delicious, so I knew it was something I wanted to try at home.

I based my red sauce on Jamie Deen’s huevos rancheros recipe; my main modification was using green chilies instead of a jalapeno. I also used diced tomatoes but decided that next time I would go with whole or stewed instead for a deeper flavor.

Base ingredients for the red sauce

I blended these in a blender, then transferred to a sauce pan to warm while I focused on the green sauce.

For this, I used the green half of this Food Network recipe. This recipe is legit, as it called for roasting the tomatillos, onion, pepper, and garlic before making the sauce. I did this in a cast iron skillet over high heat on my awesome gas cooktop.

Roasting the ingredients for the green sauce.

For the record, this is the first time I’ve ever used tomatillos. I have no idea if the were ripe or anything, but it seemed to turn out just fine. Then I blended them all up and transferred to yet another saucepan to warm.

Will it blend? Yes, yes it will.

I didn’t make any modifications to this recipe except for one that I literally just realized I did on accident: instead of halving the Anaheim pepper, I used a whole one. No wonder I thought it was almost too hot to eat…mystery solved. Bart tells me it was just right and to not change it. We’ll see next time. The only modification I think I’d make in the future is adding some spices like cumin and coriander for a little added depth.

Next, I turned my attention to some refried beans. I always make my own, usually with pintos that I cook myself.  I add the equivalent of one can of beans to a skillet with a little bit of oil of my choice; I used canola oil this time. Just a tablespoon or less did it for me, but definitely suit yourself.

Pre-fried beans.

To this I added salt, onion and garlic powder, cumin, and coriander. I’m guilty of rarely measuring spices; I’m trying to reform my practices, I promise. I use something like 1/2-1 teaspoon of each.

Spicing up the refried beans.

Add these to the beans and heat them in the skillet for 5-10 minutes. If they get too dry, just add a little water and let that cook down. Once all the flavors are incorporated, mash to the desired consistency; I use the back of a spoon or sometimes a potato masher. Mine were pretty chunky this time, but I usually like it on the creamy side.

Once that was cooking, I toasted up some flour tortillas in the cast iron skillet. Corn is probably more traditional, but I had flour tortillas so there you go.

Heating up the tortillas.

Finally, I had my resident fried egg-spert, Bart, cook up a few for us. I’m the scramble master, but he’s got the magic touch for fried eggs and omelets.

Oh, and if anyone ever questions the need to have more than four burners on a cooktop, he should try making huevos rancheros sometime. Have you been counting how many separate pots and pans going on here? Go back and count them.

To assemble, I spread the refried beans on a tortilla, add the egg, then top with both red and green sauce (but this is divorciados-style, so in the immortal words of the Offspring, you’ve got to keep them separated). And a little shredded colby-jack never hurt anyone.

Huevos rancheros divorciados

You’ll notice one glaring omission to this recipe–any sausage or chorizo. That’s because I’m a dork and I forgot to pick it up at the grocery store. That’s okay; I was running out of burners anyway.

I have no idea what it is, but there’s something about this meal that is utterly delicious. Bart and I gobbled it down and went back for more. It just goes to show that expanding your horizons and trying a new dish could lead to a new favorite to add into the rotation of reliable meals. Plus, it enforces the point that we can eat just as well or better at home than we could at a restaurant and save a bunch of cash doing so. In all regards, the first new recipe for the Eat-In Challenge was successful. I’m due up for recipe #2 any day now, so I’d better start scouting out a delicious prospect. Any suggestions?

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The Instant Pot, my new kitchen toy

Well, we already blew our first November Eat-Out mini challenge (eating at home for one week straight) by having dinner out with friends last night and this afternoon. The first set volunteered to broaden our horizons by taking us to one of their favorite pho restaurants. We’ve never had any Vietnamese food before, much less pho, but they assured us the simple beef broth soup was not scary, and they were right; it wasn’t bad or weird at all, and we enjoyed sharing a meal with them. The second set was an older couple from church who has befriended us; they said that since we are poor from just buying a house they wanted to feed us. And we let them. 😉 Very sweet of them.

So, in the interest of getting to know our friends better and to experiencing something new, we decided it would be fine to shift our seven-day mini challenge up a couple of days. In the meantime, our overall challenge is going well. I’ve already tried one new recipe that I’ll share soon, but today I wanted to share my initial experience with a new kitchen gadget I got a few weeks ago.

For my birthday, Bart’s mom bought me an Instant Pot. This is something I’ve had on my wishlist for a while. I have a slow cooker and a rice cooker that I use often, and recently I contemplated getting a pressure cooker. However, I wasn’t all that excited about getting yet another bulky appliance for my kitchen, and now that my new kitchen is even smaller, a new appliance is a definitely no-go. However, about a year ago I came across an appliance called the Instant Pot, a multi-tasking device that combines a slow cooker, steamer, rice cooker, and a pressure cooker in one package. Not only would I be gaining functionality, I would be reducing the number of items I had to store in my cabinets. And the reviews were great. I held off on getting one, but now was the perfect time for my mother-in-law to gift one to me.

We’ve been so distracted unpacking that I haven’t had the opportunity to play with it, but we finally got it out today. We started off by testing the slow cooker function with some chili. I just chose the “slow cooker” option on the panel and set the number of hours I wanted.

 

Six hours later, we had a hot, delicious chili.

 

 

So, our first experience with the Instant Pot was a good one. However, a slow cooker seems like a hard thing to get wrong, so I look forward to testing out the rice cooker and especially the pressure cooker function. It claims you can cook beans in twenty minutes, compared to one or two hours when I usually do it. If that’s true, my whole world is going to get rocked.  I’ll try to share my further experience with the additional functions to let you know how it measures up. In other news, does anybody need a crock pot or rice cooker? I might know where you can find a good deal on some used ones…

As for the chili, it’s one of my staple recipes that I have in my head and not written out, but it’s easy enough to share the basic formula with you. I use a pound of ground beef, two cans of beans, one each of pintos and red beans (or the equivalent home-cooked beans, which I typically do), a can of diced tomatoes, and the appropriate amount of chili seasoning mix, either prepackaged or made from scratch, whatever I have on hand. Then I add tomato juice to make it the desired thickness; we like ours a little juicier, so I add something like two to three cups. Today I shook things up a bit and added a cup or so of frozen corn and a small can of green chilies, which made a nice variation. Chili is a great staple recipe to have–it’s tasty, quick, and very forgiving to make just how you desire.

So the Taylors are off to a good start on their eat-out challenge, despite a few unexpected meals out. Hopefully we can keep the ball rolling through the first full week of November.

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November Eat-Out Challenge

Now that we’re fully moved in and partially settled, Bart and I are trying to return to some semblance of normalcy in our daily routine. One thing that has been unusual and pervasive for us over the last half a year or more is eating out multiple times a week. We enjoy going out for a meal as a fun activity now and again, but we were relying on restaurants for food more than we typically do.

One reason for this increase in eating out was house-hunting; we would be out almost all day on Saturdays and Sundays and need to eat between showings. Another reason was my periodic lack of motivation and inspiration in the kitchen, which happens to us all at some time or another. Then, during the final weeks of packing one kitchen, moving, and unpacking into another one, we were forced to eat out with abandon as we had limited resources to cook our own meals.

Needless to say, this dining schedule begins to add up considerably in cost as well as health. It’s easy to toss a few twenties or your credit card at the check when you finish a meal without thinking, but when I stop to really look at the dollar amount of some meals, I can hardly believe I’m willing to spend that much on one meal, especially when I would balk on spending that much on an item I would use every day at home. Now, obviously we have to eat, and that does cost money, but I can cook so much cheaper at home, and most of the time it’s just as tasty. Also, we are used to eating pretty well when we cook, but when I go out for a meal, I’m definitely not ordering a salad with a side veggies. So, it seemed like November would be the perfect time to get back to our normal routine, but with a kick. To keep us motivated, Bart and I have instituted an Eat-Out Challenge for the month of November.

Here’s how it works for us. We set a budget for eating out the entire month, and we do not exceed that dollar amount by November 30 (with some flexibility for unexpected things, like guests or travel). When we did this previously in Colorado, we were able to meet or beat a goal of $100 most months, which for us translated in about one restaurant or casual dining meal per week. Here, things are pricier, and we think $125 is a good goal to shoot for. If I were brave enough to calculate an estimate of our eating out expenditures for October, I think I might faint over the difference in those two numbers, but it’s totally doable. Plus, all that money saved could be used for something else fun, like fixing up the house.

To kick start our challenge, we are instituting a mini-challenge of not eating out for an entire week. That will be more challenging if we have plans to be out on Saturday, but we can work around it. That will also make our next restaurant outing more special.

I also decided to incorporate one more challenge for myself this month. As we’ll be eating at home more, I’ll need some extra motivation for cooking interesting meals. So I’ve decided to try four new recipes this month, approximately once a week, to keep it interesting in the kitchen. Bonus points if my new recipes put my fancy Wolf oven and gas cooktop through their paces. If I come across a real winner of a recipe, I’ll be sure to share. We’ll also be in Raleigh with friends for Thanksgiving, so that would be a great opportunity to try a new holiday dish.

I’m actually looking forward to this challenge. We’ve been so scattered lately that doing something like a challenge means we’re settled enough to focus on a project other than unpacking. It’s also a nice twist that it naturally involves spending more quality time in our new home.

Do you have any goals for the new month? There’s never a better time to try something new!

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