use real butter

Recipe: quinoa, fruit and nut salad

I first read about quinoa three years ago in a food article and I tucked it away in my head. It is a great Scrabble or Tiles word to use up that Q, and everyone around you who isn’t a food dork declares it isn’t a word. What do they know? Quasar is another good one, but that has nothing to do with food. I only sampled quinoa a few times in restaurants, but lately I’ve been trying to work more grains into my diet because I love them and it is really a lack of exposure that has kept me from experimenting in the kitchen more than anything else.

dried quinoa

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Recipe: peanut brittle

Here now, I don’t have a recipe for you in the typical step-by-step today. I have been cooking, just not documenting as lovingly as usual because it’s been hectic lately and a fraction of my daylight hours have been devoted to snow worship… Not to mention the ramp up of the ARP (ass reduction plan) leaves me pretty hungry and somewhat spent, so not a lot of patience for shooting intermediate steps. But my body is adjusting quickly and I’ll be back on it soon enough. My endorphins are flowing, my muscles are rock hard, and that waistline is shrinking. I shit you not, kids. Hyperactivity has its benefits.

After my run and bike the other day, I prepared a lunch of kale and fettuccine in homemade tomato and garlic sauce and it truly rocked my world. I don’t quite understand people who go on those ridiculous fad diets – eat carbs, don’t eat carbs, eat fat, don’t eat fat, eat meat, don’t eat meat. Moderation in all things, eh? And if you’d get ye lard butt of ye couch, perhaps it wouldn’t really matter if you had that Slice of Yum.

carbo loading?

Hmmm, what else… after I made the mac nut brittle, I gave it all away. I like to make sweets, sample them, and then get rid of them. Sort of a relative ass reduction plan (rARP) because you make all of the people around you fat so that you appear relatively slimmer. It’s a joke. A joke! I wanted to make peanut brittle – the buttery kind, not the glassy kind. HolyBasil mentioned that her mom used to make it. So on a lark I looked up a recipe last night and within the hour had a batch of this:

chunky brittle and stretchy brittle

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Recipe: turkey meatloaf

My first introduction to meatloaf was at the cafeteria in elementary school. It was brown, or rather gray and smothered in an equally nasty looking gravy. Honestly, it didn’t taste bad. It didn’t taste good either. We didn’t dig on meatloaf at my house. Not that we didn’t like it, we just didn’t know what the hell it was or how to make it. Ah, the joys of growing up Chinese in the American South. Meatloaf always maintained cafeteria status for me because that’s the only place I ever saw it. Eventually I learned what was in meatloaf when I got to college. Probably one of the best things I came away with from one ex-beau was the use of chili sauce and red currant jelly instead of ketchup for the sauce. Now, I like to use ground turkey instead of beef as a healthier take on meatloaf. I prefer turkey thigh meat if it’s available because it’s not as dry as breast meat.

pouring worcestershire sauce into the mix

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