sauces that don’t remind me of diapers.

October 28, 2015

the reason i haven’t been blogging….

Well, I had high hopes of blogging at least 3x/week, major fail. Turns out, when you don’t have a full time live-in night nurse, babies actually take up a lot of time. Like all your time. So I haven’t been able to do anything besides mom shiz and gallery stuff. My bad. Now that I have “mastered” a schedule, I’ve started cooking more, but nothing super fancy because I had zero patience. I also don’t really cook a lot of brown sauces anymore. After a sweet little angel physically shits on your hand, you lose any appetite for chocolate, steak sauce and peanut butter. If you don’t have a kid, you’ll understand once you change your first “formula diaper”. Hopefully my little cutie will eat human food soon, I don’t know how much longer I can stomach her smells. The burps are even worse. Anyways, here are the salsa recipes below. They are pretty much good on anything.

Black Bean & Corn Salsa

1 can black beans (organic if possible)
1 can no-salt added corn (organic if possible)
½ C. chopped cilantro
Juice of 1 lime
½ tsp. garlic salt
1 chopped fresh jalapeño

Combine everything together and let it sit in the fridge for at least an hour before serving. Add on top of salads/nachos/tacos, or serve as a dip.

Tomatillo Salsa

5 tomatillos, weird outer skins removed
3 jalapeños
½ C. cilantro
3 cloves of garlic
1 medium white onion
1 tsp. salt
½ C. water

Blend everything until its salsa consistency. ROCKET SCIENCE. Here’s a little extra pic, just for good measure.

workin on her own little treat for mom.

things to eat when you’re trying to be less fat: kale salad edition

September 30, 2015

Now that I’m 5+ weeks post baby, I’m running out of excuses to eat burgers and ice cream for every meal, so I am slowly phasing in things that are green. My mom stayed with us for a bit right after the baby was born, and she made kale salad every night because she knows I love it, and making your own salad sometimes is the worst. By the time you chop everything up, you don’t really want the salad anymore, and would rather just eat pizza. Really, I would just rather eat pizza all day, morning-noon-and night, which is totally do-able thanks to the genius creator of Bagel Bites. Also, just FYI—you know how people have those lists of the 5 Celebrities that are hall-passes and their spouse can’t get mad? Stanley Garczynski (genius behind BBites) is most certainly on my list, alongside Jamie Foxx and Bill Nye the Science Guy. Knowledge is power. But I digress…

You can chop up the greens for this salad and keep them in a shallow container with a paper towel at the top right before the lid and take them out all week—that way you don’t have to chop all that sh*t up every night. A good dressing really is key, and don’t use a pre-made dressing. Unless you are using Goodwell & Co Asian Vinaigrette, make your own dressing always. The only reason I use their pre-made one is that I don’t always have fresh carrots and ginger on hand, and theirs tastes better than any homemade carrot/gingery dressing I can make. With salad dressings, you always use 1 part vinegar to three parts oil, so I always start out with that basic combo and add in extras. I blend mine in my little magic bullet, but you can use a regular blender, or just shake it in a dressing bottle. If you blend them, you don’t have to chop the ingredients first. In the kale salad pictured, its chopped kale with the stems removed, chopped radicchio, shaved parmesan and Marcona almonds. I always like to have something crunchy in my salads, and since I’m trying to be less of a fatass, I am opting for almonds over croutons. If the only crunchy thing you have in your pantry is a bag of goldfish, throw those in there—remember, I don’t judge. And also, I once put Flamin’ Hot Funyuns on my salad as croutons and ended up eating only the funyuns and tossing the salad. Back to the dressings….below are two of my faves, one with pesto, and one just regular old vinaigrette.

this baby will love gluten and dairy.

Pesto-Dijon Vinaigrette—makes a few servings, so keep in fridge

1 tbs. apple cider vinegar
3 tbs. extra virgin olive oil
1 tbs. pesto (I usually have pesto frozen, but you can use store bought)
1 tbs. Dijon mustard
1 chopped garlic clove
Salt and pepper

Combine all the ingredients together. It is SO easy.

Basic Red Wine Vinaigrette—this lasts for 2 weeks in the fridge, so up the amounts if you want to make a bunch.

1 tbs. red wine vinegar
3 tbs. extra virgin olive oil
1 tbs. Dijon mustard
1 tsp. maple syrup
1 garlic clove
Salt and pepper

Also, since males seem to hate kale salad, you can’t really serve them just that and think they will still love you. Which is where Naan pizzas come in. Naan is just a fancy term for flatbread, and it is something good to keep in your fridge or freezer. We always seem to have an open jar of some sort of tomato sauce in there too, so I whipped up some naan pizzas last night. Just put tomato sauce on the naan, fresh mozzarella (or whatever cheese peasants keep in their fridge if you don’t regularly keep balls of fresh mozz in there) and fresh chopped basil. Bake in the oven at 400 until the cheese is bubbly (about 10 minutes). If you live somewhere where there is a Zoe’s Kitchen, buy their “Spice of Life” seasoning and sprinkle on top…and then mail me a thing of it. Thanks.

because babies+food=life

biscuits & baby. nay, gravy

September 29, 2015

light brunch for two

I almost had my baby in a parking lot.

My sweet husband thought it was a good idea to take a picture of me, mid-contraction, on a bench outside of the hospital. That happened several times on the way from the car to the room….

Or at least that’s what we will tell our sweet girl in 15 years. Turns out, I don’t understand what contractions feel like, and am a total dumbass. Either that, or I just wanted to have three square meals before I checked into the hospital. I probably should have gone to the hospital 10 hours before I actually got there, but an hour and a half after I checked in, we had a beautiful baby girl who has stolen my attention span and yearning to cook for the past five weeks. She’s my new obsession and I’ve taken over 1200 photos of pretty much the same thing and think they are just the cutest. I’m SO annoying now. It has taken me almost two hours to write this post because I’ve picked the baby up fifteen times because I thought she needed to burp. Or was having a bad dream. Or wanted to pet the dog. Or just wanted to love on me. Whatever, I am a baby person now, get over it. But I know I still love my dog, still love to cook, and still love my husband. All in pretty much that same order. (Jk?). But seriously, my dog is the best.

he guards the babe at all times

Anyways, the day before I hatched our baby, I decided a breakfast feast was the way to go. It was going to be our last Sunday as a family of 3 (yes, my dog counts as a human), and a lazy fat Sunday needed to happen. And it did…. Homemade piggies, sausage gravy, soft scrambled eggs, sausage, and fruit (for picture purposes only) graced the menu. I used canned biscuits b/c I didn’t have enough flour to make a full batch of biscuits from scratch, but the gravy is really the best part, so that should be the most important. If you aren’t 9 months pregnant and don’t have an excuse to eat for two, I guess you could use low-fat ingredients or eat less, but I recommend using exactly what I used…I won’t judge.

Breakfast before Baby

1 lb spicy breakfast sausage
½ C. flour
3 tsp. black pepper—it’s better if you freshly grind it. It’ll burn calories
½ tsp. onion powder (leave out if you don’t like onions)
½ tsp salt—add more if needed
5 cups whole milk

In a cast iron pan, cook the breakfast sausage, breaking it up into desired size. I like to break it up into little tiny pieces so that there is sausage in every bite. Once the sausage gets close to fully cooked, add in half of the flour and stir to coat the sausage, stirring/cooking for 30 or so seconds and then add in the rest of the flour. Once the sausage absorbs the flour, add in the milk and onion powder and whisk/stir to combine. Simmer the gravy for 10ish minutes until it becomes a gravy-ish thick consistency. Ew, that sounds gross. Add in the salt and pepper and taste it. If it needs more salt, add it. If it’s too thick, add more milk. Don’t be an idiot. If you want a badass biscuit recipe, use this one: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/biscuits-recipe.html because Paula Deen is one b*tch who isn’t messing around with biscuits. Or diabetes. Or anyone who isn’t white. Basically Paula Deen is a racist diabetic, but damnit if she doesn’t have some good recipes. She even created Deep Fried Chocolate Pound Cake and something called “Is It Really Better Than Sex? Cake.” Vomit. The thought of Paula Deen getting dirty… not something I should’ve put in your head? Ok fine, imagine childbirth. Not sure which is worse?

Wait, yes I do. CHILDBIRTH

Only nugget yummier than chick-fila’s

So now, I am about to bid farewell to the angel that has been helping us with sweet E for the past few weeks and hopefully will start cooking more and writing more, so stay tuned… My four-legged assistant seems to be quite the babysitter, so maybe I can leave the babe at home with her brother and write more restaurant reviews? TBD…. Warning, the rest is of this is just cute pics of my little hot pocket. Stop reading if you hate babies (which is where I would’ve stopped reading five weeks ago to be totally honest).