Warm beef bacon and spinach salad

Here’s a quick weeknight meal, inspired by The Pioneer Woman’s “Best Spinach Salad Ever.” 

Where can you find kosher beef bacon? Both Grow and Behold and KOL Foods carry it. Some kosher grocery stores may carry it too. Sometimes beef bacon is called “beef fry” instead of beef bacon (and may look like fatty porcine bacon or be more processed, like turkey bacon). I can’t eat the grocery store kind, at least the kind that Kosher Mart carries, it has carrageenan in it (which gives foods a thicker/creamy mouth feel but also gives me sad tummy in moderate doses).

Oh, you don’t want an rant about my food issues, you want a recipe, right? Here I am, teasing you with a messy kitchen table photo of my dinner that I started to eat before photographing it (this salad is best eaten immediately after all).

Deena’s warm spinach and beef bacon salad

INGREDIENTS

• 3 slices BEEF BACON
• 1-2 Tbls good olive oil, as needed
• 1/2 small red onion
• 4 oz white button mushrooms
• 8 ounces, clean, dry, baby spinach
• 1 1/2 Tbs. reserved BEEF BACON grease (or beef bacon fat + olive oil to reach the correct volume)
• 1 1/2 Tbs. red wine vinegar
• 1/2 tsp. honey
• 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
• small sprinkle of kosher salt
• freshly ground pepper
• OPTIONAL: 3 hard boiled eggs
• OPTIONAL: chopped cherry tomatoes (I had some from my garden)

DIRECTIONS

In a tiny bit of oil, fry the beef bacon until crispy/chewy. Set aside on a paper towel.

Remove the warm grease from the pan with a spoon, add olive oil as needed to come up to 1 and 1/2 tablespoons, and set aside.

Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to the warm skillet and return to medium heat.

Slice red onions very thinly, add to skillet. Slowly cook the onions until they’re caramelized and reduced. Set aside on a plate.

Slice mushrooms and add to the same skillet. Slowly cook the mushrooms until they’re caramelized and reduced. Set aside with the onions.

Chop up beef bacon into little nibbles.

OPTIONAL: Peel and slice eggs.

Make hot beef bacon dressing! Add the 1 1/2 set aside bacon grease/oil, vinegar, honey, and Dijon to the skillet over medium-low heat. Whisk to combine and heat through.

Place spinach in a large bowl. Add onions, mushrooms, and beef bacon on top. Pour hot dressing over everything; toss to combine.

Top with optional eggs and/or tomatoes and serve immediately. Serve with focaccia or other fresh bread.

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Hi, world!

Sorry I’ve been quiet on the blog-o-sphere for so long. Busy + happy = no time to mope around and blog. Ben and I have been doing a lot of local exploring lately with friends, which means I’m shy about bringing my camera along and then using it when I do bring it and posts without photos are just dull.

Anyhow, I just wanted to let any remaining readers know that I haven’t abandoned you, I’ve just been busy. Also, I’m tired and cranky today and that seems to be my trigger to blog!

Why am I tired and cranky? The fire alarm in our apartment building went off THREE TIMES yesterday. Once at 3:30 PM (no big deal, we went for a walk). Then again at 11:10 PM (thankfully we were running late with the whole bed time thing and hadn’t gotten in the shower yet, though normally one of us would be all clean and brushing their teeth while the other showered right then. Than again at 12:45 AM this morning. BLECH! Apparently there is some sort of pressure issue with the sprinkler system in the parking deck next to/attached to our building (not the first time this has happened) and it was so drastic that it set off the alarm for the apartment building too!

What I’m wondering is that there are over 100 units in our building, most of which are 2 bedrooms, where were all those people!? There were about 40 people milling around outside the building for the afternoon alarm, then maybe 20 for the 11:10 PM alarm, and then only about a dozen people milling around the front door for the 12:45 AM alarm. Did people sleep through it? HOW!? Did they stay inside? WHY?! What kind of person ignores a fucking fire alarm and stays inside? I knew there was a 99% chance of it being a false alarm, but I still put on a coat, boots, hat, mittens, and grabbed my nook HD (it’s an awesome little Android tablet I bought myself for hannukah with leftover birthday money), cell phone, and purse each time. If I’d actually smelled smoke I may have made the stupid choice to grab a few choice items (change of clothes, meds, laptop, ketubah, jewelry, and viola). But the hallway was cool, smelled like curry (not usual in our building), and no one seemed panicked.

I suppose I can save this post from being whine-fest 2014 by summing up some of the awesome things we’ve done over the past few months, you can see why I say we’ve been busy:

• Ben was on partial leave due to the shutdown (only allowed to work 5 hours/week “to preserve property”)
• Becca came to visit from Calgary! They went and did touristy things and made me some awesome dinners while I continued to adjust to my new job
• Visited the Maryland Renaissance Festival, where we met up with some friends to see an organ recital in the woods
• Attended a CU alumni event focusing on the NASA/CU collaboration on MAVEN
• Saw CAVALIA at the National Harbor with my dad and got a VIP tour of the stables after the show
• Hosted a cooking party where we cooked fondue bread pudding in a pumpkin with vegan “bacon,” yum!

• Visited the White House for the Fall Garden Tour (post forthcoming)
• attended the National Kidney Foundation masquerade gala (sans masks, but with peacock feathers!)

• watched a rocket launch from Wallops Island Spaceport from the roof of our apartment building
• Cooked a vegetarian Thanksgiving feast (served with a side of turkey, for those who wanted it) at my parents house for my dad, my brothers, and a friend of ours
• Went shopping for some very specific good deals on Black Friday, then stopped by my parents house to eat leftovers for lunch and finish my shopping online (new carry-on suitcases, nook HD and cover, etc.)
• Hosted a friend for Shabbat Thanksgiving to help sooth her nerves before arguing before the Supreme Court
• Attended a last-night-of-Hannukah holiday potluck (yum!)
• Attended and helped deep fried a kosher turkey at “Friendsgivikkah” pot-luck feast

we had to prep in the laundry room because their kitchen is dairy and then decided that the floor was less wobbly than the washer/dryer tops

G and Ben checking on the bird 3/4 way through cooking

• Attended my office holiday party and Secret Santa gift swap at a nice steak restaurant downtown (we each had a beautiful, huge, salmon steak)
• Went out for pre-Christmas Dim Sum and a movie [the Hobbit, part 2 of 3] with my family (even Gramma came!)
• Attended Ben’s uncle and family’s holiday party
• Spent a whole day visiting the Newseum
• Attended a potluck New Years Eve party at a friend’s apartment building’s party room downtown
• Spent a whole day cooking party with Andrea and company preparing a Turcchetta with a sues-vide machine and then deep frying it and serving it with other modern-American Thanksgiving fare
• Had pizza with an old friend and her family in McLean and then went to see the Capitol Steps show at the community center

What else…. My weight loss goal is going SLOOWLY, but mostly steadily down. It’s frustrating when you keep weighing in at -0.4 lbs per week, but then I realize that that adds up to almost -2 lbs/month, and that .4 lbs is just shy of two sticks of butter (eww!). Slow and steady supposedly stays off more easily and more permanently than binge dieting, but sometimes I just want to fool the scale and be done with all this meticulous attention to my food intake and exercise-earned flex points allowance. Re-learning proper portion and teaching myself to have self control and around tasty foods is HARD. F’ing cookies, salt water taffy, home made caramels, and other holiday treats. I’m just grateful that I’m allergic to most traditional treats (no nuts, peanuts, chocolate, or berries, plus lots of other things too). My allergies are a good reason not to try something and great and easy excuse as to why I’m not eating something at parties. SELTZER WATER IS MY FRIEND, but then I have to occasional be seen with an alcoholic beverage or folks start to stare and my mid-section (which is still kinda plumpy, but not in a baby-filled way, just a food-baby way).

Please remind me to post about the White House tour if I forget by the end of the week!

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Hehe, my bad cooking has been re-published

In case you missed my Avocado Pie Fail, you can read a summery of it here: http://www.pinterestfail.com/2013/09/18/fail-avocado-pie/

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Avocado Pie FAIL!

Let me start by saying that this pie was DELICIOUS! It also looks like Slimer from the Ghostbusters cartoon. I’d say it also qualifies as a FAIL inspired by Pintrest.

Almost every week one of my favorite bogs, Serious Eats, has a Share Your Sweets photo roundup. This weekend’s challenge was “summer pie.” I had just bought a bag of HUGE, Costco-sized avocados (from Costco) and decided that since I’d purchased them in August they were a summer fruit and therefor I would look for a recipe for avocado pie (also because I realized WTF am I going to do with 7 huge avocados when they all ripen within 24 hours of each other?!). This seemed like a good plan to use up the smallest two (AKA normal sized) avocados.

Here were my inspirations:

Pinch My Salt’s seemingly simple avocado pie, as modified by chez us.

simple avocado pie from Pinch My Salt

inspiring avocado meringue pie from chez us

Yeah. Mistakes I made:

1. We didn’t have any sweetened condensed milk, so I googled how to sub evaporated milk and sugar (hint, it’s 3/4 cup of sugar for every 5 oz of evaporated milk, I eyeballed 1 1/3 cups of sugar into 12 oz of evaporated milk to “keep the sugar content down”). You have to heat the mixture to combine the sugar and then cool it completely before using it, mine was tepid. FAIL ONE.
2. I misread 3.5 oz of lemon juice for 3.5 Tbls. FAIL 2. Plus, I used lime, but that shouldn’t have mattered as much as the missing 1.5 Tbls of juice.
3. I tried to “bling out my pie” by slicing a small avocado into thin slices and fanning them in the crust before pouring in the goop. FAIL 3. SPLORT!

Oh, you want to see how mine came out? Sure, OK:

avocado lime pie with meringue topping

attempting to serve avocado pie

VERDICT: I will try it again with the right ingredients, without sliced avocado, and without the meringue topping and maybe just a dollop of plain yogurt or unsweetened whipped cream. Even with the slightly reduced sugar it was a seriously SWEET dessert. I remember sweetened condensed milk as a more mellow sweet, kinda caramel-y, rather than the assertive WHITE SUGAR sweet that I got from the glop I made. With so many possible easy fixes, how can I not try to make this again in the future?

avocado lime pie “glamor shot”

I know I’m not going to win any food photography contests any tim soon, but I really did want to try with this! Look, I had props and everything! I was going to cut open the avocado and display the 1/2 with the pit, but decided against “wasting” good fruit on such a deliciously sloppy pie.

FINAL LATE NIGHT THOUGHT: If I rename this Slimer Pie, would that make it better?

NUTRITIONAL INFO: I don’t want to know. I guessed 7 WW PointsPlus per 1/8th. It might be closer to 11. Like I said, I don’t want to know. I ate my slice 90 minutes ago and now I have a slight sugar hangover.

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Colca Cañon Quinoa Soup recipe on Food52.com

For a yummy KOSHER soup recipe, please click on, visit, like, save, etc. my Colca Cañon Quinoa Soup recipe on Food52.com. If you all like, save, click on read my recipe enough times over there in the next 2 days, maybe I’ll win some swag from Bob’s Red Mill (a company I’d love to support more, if their products weren’t so out of my price range).

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Homemade Cherry Lime Yogurt Popsicles

What happens when you’re bored in the summer and a former Michgander who is SUPER excited by gorgeous, late season cherries in the grocery store? POPSICLES!

See that photo below, those beautiful cherries are are almost as big as the lime in the background! Yum. This popsicle tasted a lot like store-bought cherry yogurt but less sweet and with a little extra tang from the lime soaked into the cherries. Mmm.

CHERRY LIME YOGURT POPSICLES

• 1 cup of cherries, pits removed and chopped into bits
• 1 Tbl sugar
• 1 Tbl lime juice
• 7 oz Fage 0% yogurt (one single serving package)

1. Chop up your cherries (I cut them into 8ths), removing the pits as you go (if you don’t have a cherry pitter).
2. In a bowl, macerate the cherries in the sugar and lime juice for at least 30 minutes, but no more than an hour.
3. Combine the yogurt with the soupy cherry mixture.
4. Spoon the mixture into your favorite popsicle molds, using a chopstick to knock out as many bubbles as possible, insert popsicle sticks or the handles that go with your mold before freezing.
5. Freeze for at least 4 hours before serving.
6. To remove your popsicles from the mold, place the mold in a glass of room temperature water for about 3 minutes to soften the edges and make it easier to remove the popsicle from the mold.

Nutritional Info: 3-4 servings, depending on your popsicle mold size. 1 WW PointsPlus each.

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Kale and Chorizo Pasta

This is one of my go-to meals for when I realize it’s after 6PM and there’s nothing to eat for dinner yet. Yes, it’s a pasta dish but it’s also 1/2 good stuff too! Carbs get a bad wrap from some folks, but I don’t care because I know that I’m one grumpy chica if there’s nothing in my tummy but veggies and protein; carbs are what make me feel well fed in a way that other foods don’t.

To me, carbs are rice (brown over white), pasta (depends on the sauce, but regular and whole wheat both have their place), bead, corn, and potatoes. Seriously, it’s not a meal to me if none of those things is present. I was NOT a happy camper during phase 1 of the South Beach Diet. Also, it is expensive to fill up on non-starchy foods. Per serving grains and starchy foods are relatively cheap compared to veg and protein, even organic grains and starches!

Anyway, here’s my newest recipe that is SUPER simple and only takes as long as it takes to boil water and make a box of pasta (about 30 minutes for me).

garlic and chorizo in the pan

stirring the kale and chorizo into the pasta

mixing it all up

Kale Chorizo Skillet Dinner

• 1 box (12 oz) of WHOLE WHEAT PENNE*
• 1 box (10 oz) FROZEN CHOPPED KALE
• 1/2 package (6-8 oz) SOY CHORIZO SAUSAGE (chopped up, if in link form)
• 3 cloves GARLIC, sliced
• 1 Tbl OLIVE OIL
• 1/4 cup REDUCED-FAT COLBY JACK CHEESE, shredded
• bonus ingredients: SMOKED SALT

1. Bring a medium sized pot of salted water to a boil (I used a 4 qt sauce pan). You don’t want to use your largest pot because you want the water to be super starchy. Get your pasta in there as soon as it comes to a boil. Don’t forget to set a timer for the pasta according to your packaging!
2. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium.
3. Defrost your kale in the microwave, give that “defrost” button a try!
4. Sautee the garlic until golden brown, stirring frequently.
5. Add the chorizo to the skillet, chopping it up with your spatula, keep stirring frequently.
6. Once the chorizo is heated through (it may or may not start to brown), add the defrosted kale (drain off any water present before adding kale).
7. Just before the pasta timer goes off, and you’ve got your colander set to drain the pasta, add a few tablespoons of pasta water to the kale chorizo mixture, stir.
8. Drain the pasta, combine in the skillet with the kale chorizo mixture.
9. Serve topped with a sprinkle of cheese and smoked salt.

Serve immediately and goes well with your favorite rosé or cervesa/light beer!

Serves 6. 6 Weight Watchers Points+ per serving.

*Ben was the cook tonight and couldn’t find the whole wheat penne behind the regular penne in the cupboard, oops. I thought that it wasn’t as good as the last time we made it because it was a) lacking in the slight nuttiness of the whole wheat pasta and b) there is more regular pasta in a box (16 oz rather that 12-13.25) so the add-ins were more sparsely distributed. Oh well.

And while I still have your attention, I’d like to compose a mini love letter to my Cuisinart Ceramic Nonstick pans and dutch oven. After a few years of use they’re getting some nicks around the edges of the pans (either from moving or knocking around in the drying rack) but they cook so wonderfully! If you’re looking for teflon-free nonstick these are my #1 recommendation.

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Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

OMG, you guys, these cookies are AMAZING, tiny, buttery, slightly sweet, matcha scented gems. Plus I got to use my cookie gun. Yeah, you heard me: cookie gun. Well, technically it’s called a cookie press, but look at it!

Kuhn Rikon Cookie Press

Yeah, that’s a cookie gun.

For these cookies I was inspired by Food Network‘s Honey Spritz Cookies, found via The Foodie’s Kitchen; but those cookies sounded too wintery so I had to change them without trying the originals or having used a cookie press in probably 15 years. I’m living on the edge here. The edge of DELICIOUS!

Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

• 2 c minus 2 tsp all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp matcha (potent green tea powder)
• 1 stick (8 Tbl) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/3 c white sugar
• 1 egg (large)
• 1/4 c honey
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F after putting the racks in the 1/3 and 2/3 position. Move two clean, unlined baking sheets away from the oven to keep them cool.
2. Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and matcha in a medium bowl and whisk to combine.
3. In your mixer bowl, beat the room temperature butter with the sugar. Beat the butter and sugar on medium high, stopping every few minutes to scrape the bowl down. In about 5 minutes you should have fluffy, glossy, creamed butter.
4. Use cooking spray to lube a measuring cup and measure out your honey.
5. Add the honey, egg, and vanilla extract to the creamed butter. Mix to combine, stopping to scrape the bowl down every minute or so.
6. Following the directions that came with your cookie press, fill the chamber about 3/4 full of dough (I make small blobs and shove them in and then keep packing them in until it looks full). *
7. Press out your cookies! Fill two whole trays. **
8. Bake for 5 minutes, rotate the pans front to back and top to bottom (unless you’re cooking in a convection oven, then just subtract a minute), and then bake another 6 minutes for 11 minutes total. ***
9. Let cool for 1-2 minutes before moving to wire cooling racks to cool completely.

* It will take 2-3 loads of cookie press to shape all the cookies. There will be a bit of ugly, raw dough at the end that you can’t shape., just eat it because you know you want to!

** The first few might come out ugly, that’s OK, pull them off the try and you can re-stuff them into the press later.

*** I baked mine for 6 minutes and 6 minutes and they came out a bit browner on the edges than I’d have liked. If your third tray is going in the oven solo, just use the top rack and bake for 11 minutes.

Nutritional Info: 1 Weight Watchers PointsPlus point per cookie/1 Tbl of raw dough (every nibble counts!)

raw cookies

baked cookies

PS- Does anyone know how to get my baking sheets CLEAN again? Bon Ami and elbow grease hardly make a dent in the baked on brown spots!

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Curried Coconut Popcorn

Wednesday night was a pre-wedding potluck for some new/local friends. I made this Curried Coconut Popcorn as an appetizer for a potluck and people went gaga over it! This recipe will definitely be joining my regular repertoire of potluck contributions, it’s got that sweet, salty, crunchy thing going for it plus it’s vegan and gluten free. While I am neither vegan nor gluten free, I do have a lot of food allergies/sensitivities and like making things that everyone can eat.

Do you have a favorite home method for popping corn?  I use the paper bag in the  microwave method myself, but with 2 squirts of cooking spray (I use grape seed oil) instead of olive oil and rolling down/folding the top of the bag tightly instead of stapling it.

Curried Coconut Popcorn

3/4 c popping corn (I used 1/2 blue and 1/2 yellow corn)

cooking spray, if using the microwave method – see above

coconut oil, if using the stovetop method

3/4 c coconut chips, toasted

3/4 c raisins (dark or golden)

2 heaping Tbs coconut oil

3/4 tsp curry powder

3/4 tsp ginger powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 Tbl coconut sugar

1) Pop your popcorn using your favorite method*. Keep a large bowl on standby for mixing/serving the popcorn in.

2) You can lightly toast your coconut chips while making popcorn, if the chips are older a little spritz of cooking spray can help them be less chewy. I made a tinfoil tray and toasted mine in the toaster oven using the “light” toast setting.

3) In a small bowl (I used a 6 oz ramekin), melt your coconut oil for 10-15 seconds in the microwave, just to get it warm.

4) Add the seasonings (curry, ginger, salt, and sugar) to the coconut oil.

5) Put all the popcorn in a large bowl and pour the seasoned coconut oil over it, shake/stir to coat.

6) Add the raisins and coconut chips and shake to combine.

7) Let cool to room temp (about 10-15 min) and then keep covered until you’re ready to serve (no more than 2 hours).

*If you’re going the microwave route for this recipe, pop only 1/4 cup of popcorn at a time, and use a new paper bag for all three rounds.

Credit where credit is due: this recipe was inspired by Naturally Ella and A Pinch of Glitter.

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Quick Coffee Cake

not my cake, but similar looking

Ben’s parents were in town over the long weekend. They stayed at his mom’s brother’s house, with his family, near the Tenlytown metro stop (not far from my aunt and uncle’s house). I’ll recap our tourist’s dream weekend later, for now I just wanted to share a link to the Quick Coffee Cake recipe I served when Ben’s parents and cousins came over for brunch on Sunday (his aunt and uncle went out of town for the weekend).

I’ve never tried making coffee cake before, but I learned, by reading recipes, that the gooey layer in coffee cake is often coffee soaked chopped dates! Who knew? No wonder I was never a fan of the goo, I usually love sweets and really like dates but I just don’t like coffee.

Time to bust out your tube pans (or 1/2 the recipe and make it in a 9×9″ square pan).

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