Lent is Upon Us

'Tis the season to give stuff up, and this year I'm abstaining from what I try and fail to give up every Lent: Coke. As a Coke-enthusiast, this is a seriously big challenge for me. Whereas some people can't say no to at least one piece of chocolate every day, I've gotta have my Coke fix. Yeah, I know I'd save so much money if I didn't buy a bottle every other day or so, and yes, it'd be good for my body if I cut out all that sugar and caffeine (because this girl does not do Diet Coke; ew), and of course I've heard the urban legend about how Coke is so strongly acidic that they use it to clean blood off the highway--but it doesn't matter; Coke is my Kryptonite.

(from: http://willthef1journo.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/coca-cola-and-mclaren/)

This is why I started preparing for Lent two weeks in advance of its actual start. A few weeks before Ash Wednesday I decided that, as deliciously fulfilling and thirst-quenching as I find Coke to be, and despite the fact that it would easily be my last request in any impending doom situation, Coke wasn't doing me any favors. It was sucking up all my money in exchange for copious amounts of empty calories. But instead of just quitting cold turkey on the first day of Lent and naively relying on my notoriously feeble will power, I decided to ease into it this time.  So I started slowly, cutting down my almost every day habit to a few times a week at first, then once a week, and then out entirely just in time for Lent to begin.

(from: http://queirugalibre.blogspot.com/2012/05/coca-cola-se-hace-con-el-control-de-la.html)

The caffeine headaches sucked at first, but this week they were practically non-existent. And I've rediscovered how satisfying just plain old water is when you're parched. I mean sure, every time I see the coke machine all painted with fizzy brown bubbles and placed conveniently just across the room from me at work, right in the middle of my line of sight, I let out a deep sigh (more of a whimper) of longing. But it's getting easier, and for the first time in the several years that I have made this my Lenten goal, it actually feels doable.

Top Five Foods to Pair with Mashed Potatoes

To take a little break from the usual, I decided that for this post, instead of working my way through a new recipe, I'd give my two cents on some good oldies. Of course, this post centers around what dishes go best with one of my all-time favorite foods: mashed potatoes. And for easy reading, I've compiled it all into a top five list.


So, my top five things to eat with mashed potatoes are....

5. Fried chicken, corn, cheese, and country gravy

Now this may sound like multiple dishes, but all four of these things go into one bowl with a big, steamy helping of that fluffy white goodness. That's right--chicken bowls are my fifth favorite way to have mashed potatoes. The mix of creamy and crunchy, cheesy and sweet, is just heaven in a bowl. Well, the fifth best heaven anyway.

4. Country-fried steak and country gravy

I'm realizing that I could probably make a spot just for country gravy alone as an accompaniment to mashed potatoes, but that's not a real meal (I wish), so I won't. I first tried country-fried steak somewhat recently, within the last four years or so, but it was an instant classic. Once again, there's that element of juxtaposition: it's that creamy and crunchy combination that really brings out the best of both foods.

3. Turkey breast

As a Thanksgiving classic, who hasn't tried dipping their turkey into their mashed potatoes? You know exactly what I'm talking about here. On its own, turkey breast to me has always kind of blah (I'm a dark meat person), but paired with mashed potatoes, turkey magically becomes absolutely delicious!

2. Steak

I mean, was there any question as to whether this would be on the list? They just go together, like they were made for each other. Whenever I'm in the mood for either steak or mashed potatoes, a craving for the other is sure to follow. It's like a thick, medium-rare flank dripping in its own juices was just meant to cuddle up next to a creamy, buttery pile of mashed up spuds, flakes of red skin visible throughout the mound. This came very close to the coveted top spot, but ultimately I had to go with...

1. Chicken fettuccine alfredo

Starch upon starch! Sounds terribly bad for you, I know, but I swear the best meal I've ever had that involved mashed potatoes also included a heaping helping of this hearty pasta. And what's even stranger, is that it was from Hyvee catering. Who knew? But I highly recommend it if your taste buds have been anywhere close to mine thus far. The chicken helps to break up the starchiness, while you still get to enjoy two popular and tasty carb-loaded dishes in one sitting. Just remember to do some intense cardio the next day, because this meal will stick with you in the least flattering way possible.


Overall, I think this is a solid list. Eccentric, maybe, but solid. And now of course I'm dying to eat all of these, ranking system be damned.

The Long-Awaited Conclusion of "Yummy Oat Pancakes"

Though it's been a few days since I've had them and I'm just now getting around to blogging about it, the memory of the oat pancakes we made last Thursday is still fresh and vivid. Despite having eaten several (good) meals since then, the oat pancakes are by far my favorite dish of the week (and I treated myself to both China Palace AND The Greek Corner Gyros this past week, so that's saying a lot).

After soaking the oats in buttermilk overnight, my roommate and I just needed to mix together the rest of the ingredients. In a small mixing bowl, we combined the dry stuff:

1/2 cup flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (trust me, that's plenty!)
1/4 teaspoon salt

In a medium mixing bowl, we combined the wet stuff:

2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 stick of melted butter

First, we added the wet stuff to the soaked oats and combined it all with a big rubber spatula. The result was a very yellowy version of the chunky wet stuff we had before. I wish I could say it was appetizing, but it really wasn't. Then we added the dry stuff. This had the effect of at least changing the color from sickly yellow to an off-white, tan-ish color, and it made the consistency more thick than chunky. Now it was really starting to look like batter.

And bam! We were ready to fry up some pancakes. As you might have guessed, the process is essentially exactly the same as with regular pancakes. You scoop about a half a cup's worth of batter into a measuring cup, depending on how big you want your pancakes, and then pour them onto a hot griddle that has been sprayed with Pam.

One thing that is a little different about pancakes made with oats, though, is that it is harder to see the bubbles. I was always taught that you know a pancake is ready to be flipped when it starts to bubble, but with this kind of pancakes, it's hard to see the tiny bubbles amid the speckled cinnamon and oats. Lucky for us, unlike with regular pancakes, oat pancakes taste good when they're just a little crispy.

Once the pancakes have turned a decent golden brown on both sides (or even slightly darker), they're ready to be plated and served, preferably with butter and powdered sugar. If you're like most people and enjoy maple syrup, have at it. I, on the other hand, cannot stand the stuff. I stuck with my sugar fix.

And there you have it: a very UN-mediocre stack of tasty oat-filled pancakes, if I do say so myself.

(Side note: As you may have noticed, my pictures just got way more frequent and way cooler. That's because I recently installed Instagram on my phone just so I could take nice pictures for this blog. (Don't judge me.) And don't worry, while everything certainly looks cooler with the filters on than it would if I had just left it as my crappy phone camera captures everything, I do try to be loyal to the food's real life level of deliciousness, meaning I'm not gonna fluff up a botched recipe with a perfect-looking picture; I'd like to portray my results as honestly as possible. Just be prepared for even more classy food pictures to come!)

Yummy Oat Pancakes

My mom was never much of a baker; she'd rather eyeball measurements and proportions till she got something to taste just right than be precise. This is the reason why I never learned to bake anything fancier than those pre-cut Pillsbury sugar cookies. But I've been able to get by with mostly just cooking, and I've never really been into stuff like cake or cupcakes anyways (I'm more of a straight up chocolate kinda girl).

Where pancakes fall in the baking-cooking divide, I'm not entirely sure. You obviously don't bake them in the oven, you fry them on the stove top, but making the batter is very much like making cake batter in that your measurements have to be exact. Too much flour, the batter's too thick; too much milk, the batter's too thin. Either way, those are some bad pancakes. Needless to say, I can't just guess at how much of each ingredient I will need. I'm going to need some practiced hands if I want to make one of my favorite breakfast foods: oat pancakes.

My first experience with oat pancakes was at my best friend's house around fifth grade or so. Her mom, a woman who rather enjoys baking and has a knack for it, made these delightful little speckled rounds that resembled pancakes, but were oh-so-much more than that. They were fluffy, as a pancake should be, but textured; you could taste and feel every oat and grain in them. To me, this was a new and pleasant experience for my mouth, but texture like that is not for everybody. Lightly sweetened with cinnamon, they were especially good with butter and powered sugar.

But I haven't had them in years. There's more work to them than with regular pancakes, so they don't get made very often, and I haven't been over to my friend's house often enough in the last few years to catch her mom on a day when she's going to the trouble of making them. Lucky for me, though, my best friend is also my current roommate.

So after finishing up our foray into pesto sauce last week, she suggested we call her mom and try to make an old favorite for ourselves. I enthusiastically agreed.

And tonight's the night! Sort of. First thing's first, though, you have to soak the oats in buttermilk overnight. I measured out two cups of old-fashioned oats and two and half cups of buttermilk, and then my roommate started to combine them.

The buttermilk was as thick as a melted milkshake, but the two ingredients gradually mixed together. I made a face. The mixture began to look more and more like, well, blown chunks. I wasn't too surprised, the batter was supposed to be chunky, but it did weird me out just a little.

          "Looks gross," I said.
          "Smells gross," she said.

Sure enough, the bowl smelled unexpectedly like sour cream. As strange as it is, that's what buttermilk smells like apparently. Nevertheless, as we covered the bowl and slid it into the fridge to sit until morning, we were giddy with excitement.

This was only a few hours ago; tomorrow I will wake up and fill the kitchen with the smell of not sour cream, but lovely oat pancakes (which, although they have a taste all their own, smell pretty much just like regular pancakes). So get excited, because my next post will be delicious!

Part Two of the Great Pesto Adventure!

I know all of you five or so people (and that's being generous) who read this blog are in high anticipation, on the edge of your seats even, just waiting to here the conclusion of my last post. Well, wait no longer, for the secret to pesto has been (somewhat) discovered!

Because Walmart disappointed us with its basil product selection, my roommate decided to expand her search to Hyvee. Here she found some lovely fresh basil, though it was a little pricey.

Now, to adjust the proportions of her recipe. She knew she needed a lot of basil, a little more olive oil, and a lot less Parmesan cheese than last time. Here were he conclusions:

2 cups fresh basil
2 cloves worth of minced garlic
1/4 cup pine nuts
2/3 cup olive oil
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
salt and pepper to taste

So last night, after using my handy chopper to chop first the fresh basil and then the pine nuts, she threw everything together in her magic bullet.

So we went from this....

(from: http://www.hy-vee.com/health/healthnotes/default.aspx?%2Fassets%2Ffood-guide%2Fbasil%2F~default)

to this....

Though still a little on the goopy side, it turned out much better than last time. It smelled strongly of basil, giving it that earthy, slightly minty scent. And it tasted a lot like basil, too, though in a good, pesto-y kind of way. My roommate still holds that it's not quite as good as her mom's homemade version, but I'm perfectly content with it. It's good on pasta, or even some gnocchi. In fact, I'm seriously considering digging into the leftovers for lunch today :)

Did you know that basil comes in a paste?

For this two-part post, I am cooking vicariously through my roommate who is trying to make her own pesto sauce. Armed with dried basil, olive oil, minced garlic, grated Parmesan cheese, pine nuts, and a magic bullet blender, she has made one very brave attempt so far.

The result was a pale, goopy, oily mush that didn't coat the pasta very well and that tasted solely like Parmesan. That's the thing with pesto though, I guess: you have to play around with the proportions until you get it just right.

We also concluded from trial #1 that part of the problem was the basil--you really need fresh basil leaves to make this work (we think). So off to Walmart we went.

After scouring the baking and spices aisle, the produce section, and even the random little kiosks scattered throughout the store, the only basil product we found aside from dried basil was basil paste.

Yep, that's a thing:

(from: http://goodenessgracious.com/2011/03/oh-my-sweet-basil.html)

Granted, I've never tried basil paste before, so it could be perfectly good and work perfectly well for cooking and such. Maybe we were still a little weirded out by the liquid egg product (made from real eggs!) that I had spotted earlier in our shopping trip, but we were put off by the paste. 

But somewhere, out there, preferably in Kirksville, there has to be some fresh basil. That, and maybe less Parmesan cheese, will guarantee the perfect pesto, we're just sure of it! So stay tuned, because the search continues...

At least Kinky was on sale...

(from: http://www.drinkhacker.com/2012/12/21/review-kinky-liqueur/)

Super Bowl Fail

Warning: This post may or may not have turned into a rant about my day going from bad to worse yesterday, but I PROMISE it's entertaining, if nothing else because it's rather pathetic.

Despite not having cable and not caring about football in the slightest anyway, I had quite a spread planned out for our not-so-Super-Bowl Party. My roommate and I invited a few other girls over to just hang out and eat our food. It was going to be great. Here's what I planned to make/have:

1. Summer sausage and a small assortment of cheeses (two kinds to be exact, mild cheddar and Colby Jack)

2. Pigs in blankets (aka, little smokies wrapped in crescent rolls in case you live under a rock)

3. Breaded cheese balls made from string cheese in an imitation of a Pinterest recipe

4. And finally, margarita tequila chicken wings in place of hot wings (I don't do spicy)

Naturally, the margarita tequila chicken wings were to be the crown jewel, as well as the one thing on this list of party food that I had never made before. But still, it was going to be great. I was going to learn to make wings and everybody was going to love them. 

Or so I thought. The day before the big game was when it started to go down hill. 

Before I could do anything with the wings, I had to marinade them in, well, essentially a margarita. It seemed like a strange idea, but I like chicken and I love margaritas, so what could go wrong, right? With the marinade all mixed and the chicken thawed, I set out to prep the wings to be soaked overnight. But I didn't know you had to separate the wings yourself; I just thought they came ready as little drummies and little wing things and that was that. Apparently, you have to separate the full wing at the joint to get the usual two pieces. Okay, I thought, no problem. The brief instructions I found online simply said, "Cut apart at the joint." So I got my knife and set to work hacking and sawing at the skin, fat, tendons and bone that met at the joint of the wing with little to no success. I spent at least fifteen minutes struggling with just this one wing to no avail, and so I gave up, deciding that my wings were just gonna be twice as big as normal wings! I tossed them whole into the marinade and shoved the bowl in the fridge to sit. As frustrating as that experience was, this was still not a disaster, I still had things under control. 

The next day, I waited around anxiously, not sure when I should start cooking and in what order I should cook everything. I analyzed my day and all the recipes and the different oven temperatures and the probability that my guests would come early, and several more obscure factors. I eventually decided that either something wasn't going to be ready when everybody arrived, or something would be cold by the time they all got here. Ultimately, I just arbitrarily started getting out ingredients and preheating the oven around four, hoping for the best. 

Sure enough, it was not long before I realized that not only could I not find the aluminum foil I knew we had, but both of our baking sheets had disappeared as well. After indulging in a brief fit of exasperation, I managed to get a hold of a friend at the last minute who could supply me with both. Whew, close one. I was still on top of things at this point, still moving forward with the cooking. Despite that little hiccup, everything was going to be okay. 

Then my cheese balls melted in the oven. I think it was because I didn't use the right type of cheese because it worked fine the first time I made it, but the first time I made it I used the white string cheese and not the variety pack. The recipe never said to use a particular type, though! So Pinterest failed me, but I still had other dishes.

Then no one showed up to our party. 

Sad, I know! Apparently, when my roommate invited people over (and by people, I mean like four or five, not a huge thing) she said we would just be hanging out and having some snacks if they wanted to come by and not watch the Super Bowl. This was an accurate description of how we intended to spend our Super Bowl Sunday, except for one thing: I wasn't just picking up a few snacks, I was cooking tons of food! Ten full-sized wings, thirty-ish pigs in blankets, a whole plateful of melted cheese balls, and a large summer sausage (yeah, I said it) with sliced up cheese all sat precisely arranged on cute little platters and cutting boards across our breakfast bar (of course I forgot to take pictures) to be seen and enjoyed by no one but me, my roommate, and my boyfriend (and he only came by because he pitied us). 

One girl said she had too many meetings to go to that night; another two decided they actually wanted to see the game, so they stayed in their dorm rooms. But two of the girls we invited just bailed altogether. Lame, and rude. Even if they didn't realize how much blood, sweat and tears (but really, just mostly a LOT of tears) went into this little get-together, they at least knew we were buying some sort of snack food with our own very limited funds. Again, RUDE.

And STILL, I was trying to see the positive. Event if no one else was here to try my fancy margarita tequila wings, my roommate, my boyfriend, and I could still taste how they turned out. Excited after having smelled the marinade several times that day, I bit into the fleshy drummie part of the wing, the crispy skin crackling under my teeth and the chicken juices spilling down my chin. 

And it was gross. Just, gross. It tasted like alcohol, and I don't mean that it tasted like alcohol as in like a strong margarita, I mean it tasted like alcohol as in like straight alcohol and no other flavors whatsoever. You couldn't taste the lime or the salt or that tangy margarita-ness you get when you have the actual beverage. But I know I did it right! I followed the directions to the letter! How did this happen?? Now, I was ready to admit to defeat. Now, I really threw a fit. Then, at seven in the evening, I just went to bed wanting nothing more to do with this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. 

The only good things to come out of that day? Yummy leftovers. The pigs and blankets were especially scrumptious, and the sausage and cheese proved to be a very good late afternoon snack. I even bravely attempted to salvage the wings (I made ten of them after all!) with a pleasurable result. By drowning them in barbecue sauce and popping them in the oven for just five extra minutes, I managed to cover up the alcohol taste and just enjoyed hickory barbecue flavored chicken for dinner.

Just some of the leftovers I am currently enjoying:

So I guess everything wasn't a complete fail in the end, but two things are for sure: margarita tequila wings are nasty, and Super Bowl Sunday 2013 was not a good day for me.