Food: Favorite Recipes

I love cooking, and I've given away enough food that I need to post some recipes!  Most recipes I find online and then add to or tailor as needed or necessary, so here goes nothing.

Granola: My Pride and Joy. 

1. Granola. 

I tried a few different recipes, and the one that finally worked for me was a mixture of different oils and oats and nuts.  It started from the Smitten Kitchen recipe, and I went with the following to make it more my style.  Also, I use grams so I can more effectively utilize my kitchen scale.

100 grams each hazelnuts, pumpkin sees, sunflower seeds (or just 300 grams any nuts you like)

150 grams cashews (because I love cashews)

300 grams oats (the normal ones, nothing cut or fancy)

Handful flax seeds, chia seeds, and bran

200 ml coconut oil

3 Tablespoons olive oil

Drip of honey

2 egg whites (whisked until frothy)

Cinnamon. I put a lot in, sometimes during, sometimes after I spread it out.

(Note: this original recipe called for maple syrup, which I wasn't keen on.  I use my glass measuring cup, measure the coconut oil, add the olive oil, then add honey until I get to 220 mL of fluid, not including the eggs)

Oven is at 300 degrees.  All nuts are crushed, and ingredients combined.

Spread all on parchment sheet in a tight layer. 

Bake 45-55 minutes, turning over carefully half way through.

When browned and dry the way you like, remove.

Add some dried fruit (I like cranberries) and keep in airtight container. 

Second recipe you may like is here. I found this one a bit like crack, and couldn't stop eating it. So, I stopped making it.

Ingredients in Wait. 

I make many soups.
Carrot Ginger and Lemon is my favorite.
This Pumpkin soup is incredible.

I've tried a lot of green soups (spinach, broccoli, etc) and found them wanting.  My yellow and orange blends are far more satisfying.  Peas didn't blend so well for me.  I prefer the spinach cooked. Etc, etc.

A friend also told me she puts red curry paste into her soups sometimes.  And that news made me put red curry in my pumpkin soup.  I've more often made butternut squash soup with a similar method.  And it is amazingly easy with a bit of coconut milk.

An average K dinner. 

A few things here.
I eat this spinach daily.  I saute it in some garlic (that I prepare every week or two in a hand blender) and it takes about 2 minutes.  Usually, I heat up whatever I'm eating for leftovers and while it cooks, I make spinach.

Here is also some salmon, which came from this recipe. This one also does salmon well. Salmon is easy to buy here, and easy to cook in the oven.  In fact, it is the only meat in my kitchen ever.

The squash is another variation on the soup that I love.  Here's a recipe for squash with golden beets (which I've never been able to find) and tahini.

Prep, and Prep, and Prep, and Prep.

Another soup, the ingredients of which you see here, is Mexican Vegetable Soup.  Chop up a bunch of peppers and onion (and I replace the corn and beans with zucchini and mushrooms) and you have yourselves some soup that tastes like taco night.  (Not really, but there is a hint of Mexico in the cayenne and the spices).  Also, it is relaxing to cook this when I need to zen out in prep for a few hours.

Cook all the things!

This shows a few things on the stove. The back pot is tomato sauce.  That's coming up next.  The side is pumpkin soup (I would guess).  The pan with all the eggplant and zucchini is a green curry in the making.

I don't have a recipe for this, but I chop up these things I love (zucchini, eggplant, onion), and put them in the skillet with some olive oil until they are brown and I want to eat them.  Then, I put the curry paste in the skillet, get it warm, and add some coconut milk until it looks good.  I can elaborate more if necessary, but that's the basics.

Tomato sauce in the making. 

Finally, one of my favorites.  Homemade tomato sauce.  Spicy tomato sauce, to be exact.  I remember I tried to make spaghetti sauce once in Cambodia (for my family) and failed so miserably, so this is a nice success to have.  The answer does seem to be "give it more time to simmer" and "add some spices" and that's what I figured out how to do.

This can be used for a variety of things:
- I put it with fried eggs and spinach sometimes, as one of my favorite comfort foods.
- I made this baked eggplant and mushroom dish that tasted amazing.
- I made a version of this shakshuka with it that was also quite good.
- These spicy mushrooms would have worked well with it.

Next up in the cooking this week:
Butternut squash: Roasted whole (saw that in a magazine), Steamed (also magazine) and roasted (perhaps for a soup).
I made this warm eggplant salad with hemp seeds and kvass because it seemed Russian-esque and was pretty good.  That recipe needs tailored some though, so I'll play with the rest of the ingredients.
And very little else. School's almost out and it's time to think about travel.

Dessert!

I made this two ingredient sorbet with a pound of raspberries and strawberries, since it is the season.  Please enjoy the recipe, which is a pound of fruit, frozen, and a quarter cup of honey.  Beautiful.

Happy Cooking!

This Year In Europe

With the madness of the first year at this school, I didn't make time to blog about some of the awesome cities in Europe I went this year.  Therefore, I thought I would put them all together in one blog, with photos and strong memories that have stuck with me.  This goal of mine to see some of Europe is going to keep me busy for quite some time.

September 2016: Prague
Librarians Conference with Kris

There's a book tower in one of the libraries in Prague.
As we were all librarians enjoying the sights, this was a thing that we saw.

A "famous" dessert in Prague is the Trdelnik, with a cone made from some dough rolled in cinnamon sugar,
with insides of ice cream.  I had one with apples and cinnamon, and it was a beautiful treat. 

Kris and I were thrilled that we got "carded" on the bus.  The public transport works like an honor system - you buy and validate your tickets, and when you least expect it, someone will come on and check your ticket.  We were on our last ride in Prague, some of our last tickets, and we were thrilled to get caught following the rules. 

An overlook of the city, from a museum of science in conjunction with the famed Prague library
(which we weren't allowed to photograph).  It's old, and bricked, and beautiful.  

Prague was a great time, and the conference was fantastic!

October 2016: Geneva and the French Alps
Birthday Celebration with Peter

Birthday Cake! A lovely cheesecake.  Someone tried to wake me up for cake at 3:32 (my birth day in this time zone)
but we ate it at a more reasonable hour instead. 

The view in our little mountain chalet.  This is one of my favorite photos. 

At one point, our water was being finicky, so I drew a bath the old fashioned way. 

We did some geocaching and exploring of both the French and Swiss borders.

The view.... the glorious view.

November 2016: Paris
More time with Peter

The first... 50 of my photos in Paris were pastry related. I'll spare you the trouble of looking through them all.
Just know... they exist.

There's this church in Paris that was turned into an academy of science, and then a museum: Arts et Metiers.  It was fantastic, and there was everything from an iPod (first edition, how old I feel), to models of architecture. 

We saw a pianist in an old church, all echoey and cold. 

The Jardin du Luxembourg was so gorgeous! Also chilly. 

Okay, just one more food. Crepes. They put chocolate sticks in there!

November 2016: Sofia, Bulgaria
MS Robotics Trip

The school in Sofia has creatures and nature. Our kids were quite amused. 

Our robotics team hard at work. 

They told us that it was difficult to build the metro because they had all these ruins underneath the city.
Here is a handful. 

There was even an old spring that popped up in the middle of the city.
We, of course, all drank from it. (Maybe I'll live forever now).

December 2016: Lyon, France

Christmas with Peter

We looked around the old city of Lyon, into this old church and beautiful decorations.
I lit a candle for one of the saints.   

This was a chocolate maker, and I loved his shop so intensely.  He was a bit of the strong silent type, but the lady running the shop front (shockingly to us, his wife) was chatty and delightful.  I tasted some dark chocolates of all kinds and enjoyed the feel of the shop. 

We bought this colorful plethora of veggies at the local grocery store, and I made a ton of food.
This beautiful bouquet, though, I barely knew what to do with myself.  Plus this garlic was absolutely perfect. 

I took a French cooking class, and basically learned that if you add enough cream or butter, it will be delicious.
I also learned to make Foie Gras, which I made for Peter.  It was all in French, but luckily, a few nice ladies took me under their wing and helped me figure out some of the finer points.  

My favorite thing to visit when I travel is botanical gardens.
The gardens in Lyon had this little tropical greenhouse, which was nice because it was so chilly that day!

There will be more and more throughout the next years.  I am loving Europe, and will enjoy Portugal and Amsterdam in the coming months.

On Food: The Diagnosis That Started it All

While I’m on the subject of cooking, I am interested in talking about food.  My diet has become stricter and stricter in recent months, and I’m noticing some changes in my body as a result of the healthy eating.

But let me begin from when the journey started.  In April, I was diagnosed with something called PCOS, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.  I was diagnosed in Thailand, by a doctor who looked with an ultrasound and found some black spots on my ovaries.  In retrospect, he made the diagnosis quite quickly and didn’t really explain to me what it all meant, but I believed that I had it.  It is a disorder characterized by some hormonal changes, the inability to bear children or ovulate correctly, and comes with an extreme increase in the possibility of diabetes.  Because of my diagnosis, and the risk of diabetes, I decided to make some changes in my diet. 

I started by cutting out added sugar from my diet.  Cookies, and cakes, and sweets of any kind, plus soda and anything that has extreme sugars went away.  I treated myself from time to time with something sweet, but, on the whole, I was pretty good about getting rid of added sugar foods for the benefit of my health.  Getting off of added sugar was a bit rough, and continues to be rough during certain times, and sometimes it takes me every amount of my energy to deny myself something delicious and sweet.  But, I knew that I needed to do it for my health, and so I did.

I kept moving farther on the non-sugar train, particularly as my taste buds began to shift.  I cut out more things from my diet, slowly taking the sugar and the things that make sugar out of my diet.  I took out most alcohol.  I took out most bread and grains.  I took out almost everything that is processed or packaged in any way.  All these things make sugar, and I was so afraid of the risk of diabetes that I kept moving farther and farther from anything that resembled sugar in my body.

It hasn’t been an easy road, and it was one of the things that encouraged me to take up cooking when I moved to Moscow.  Now, for some recent memory, my diet is mostly vegetables, particularly spinach, lettuce, and carrots, with oatmeal and yogurt in the morning and salad and meat at lunch.  And, in fact, when this is disrupted, it brings my body to a very unpleasant sort of place.  This is, in fact, the catalyst for this blog post.  I went off my diet this weekend because of travel with a group of young people on a robotics trip, and my body is feeling worse than it has in weeks because of it.

I noticed this as well earlier in the week.  In fact, I decided to celebrate a recent trip to the doctor with a special bit of food.  I went to the doctor here in Russia and found out that I do not actually have PCOS, that my lady parts all look healthy and normal.  Part of me wonders if I had it at all, and the other part thinks the food might have been able to change things for me.  I wanted to celebrate this occasion and decided to do so with a special treat: bread.

So, I went to my favorite grocery store, bought a loaf of the most delicious looking bread that I could find, and made a bread and cheese plate with balsamic and olive oil to enjoy.  After this food, I passed out in a food coma of sorts.  And when I woke up, there was a hangover left in my body that I hadn’t felt in recent history.  My knees and joints felt a bit sore and inflamed, my head had cotton in it, and I just didn’t feel great.  I felt bloated and sick with the food.  And now, in coming back from the trip, I feel much the same.  I ate processed food and bread at the weekend, and far too many of them, and I’m very much regretting that at this moment.   I feel sore again, with my knees acting up and my eyes all puffy. 

I wonder about the food, because I used to have such problems with my knees when I started to run and exercise, and now I don’t notice them.  It’s hard to tell how much of this is from the food and how much from the exercise, but I’ve seen a difference in my body and the way it reacts.  Perhaps bread and processed foods make my joints ache.  Either way, food is a current obsession of mine, and I’m starting to subscribe to ideas about how food can greatly improve life.  I’m watching the documentaries, reading the books, seeing news, and it is making a change on the types of things I will ingest.

I don’t have PCOS, either because I never had it, or because my diet helped my body heal it.  Either way, I’ve found the foods that make my body healthy and happy.  Sadly, I don’t think bread is in that category, or sugars, or packaged foods.  But even without the disease, I can’t quit the path that I’ve found to make my body feel good and have the energy I need at school and at home. 

And given the recent experiences I had with asking for the food, I think I need a word like “vegetarian” that fully encompasses that idea.  I’m not a vegetarian because I eat meat.  I’m not a vegan because I have the occasional cheese and milk.  But we don’t really have a word for people who don’t eat the bread or grain or processed food or packaged food or starch and would really just like something green and delicious to eat.  It would be handy to say that instead of trying to explain all the things that end up making me sick.

Goal Update: Monies

This time two years ago, after I had moved to Thailand, I was feeling a lack of money.  Putting deposits on a place and money into moving after two years in America was quite rough.  Plus, circumstances had left me in some dire straights.  These issues were quickly resolved, but it was a hard time.

Moving to Moscow, I was a bit worried that the lifestyle that I had in Thailand would be at risk, that the city would be so much more expensive and that I would be unable to save anything.  I've been pleasantly surprised at how I'm doing, though.

One recent goal was getting out of debt.

During my time in Cambodia, I was able to save enough money to pay off all of my undergraduate loans before I started my graduate degree.  This was a huge boon to my financial situation, even if I did come back to America and struggle with the lack of credit history.

But, then I went back to school, and I took out loans to pay for it.  This is 2012/2013, for my Master's Degree in Library Science.

Here's what I took out:
$20,500 - Interest Rate: 6.7%
$8,000 - Interest Rate: 7.9%
$10,250 - Interest Rate: 5.5%
$4,000 - Interest Rate: 7.9%

School is fucking expensive.

But, I am happy to say that by the end of this year, this debt will be gone.  In less than 5 years, it will be completely finished, and my life will be debt free once again.  I had hoped that I would be debt free by the age of 30, but I will end up missing it by a few months.

It's taken a lot of work to get here, and many incentives for myself.  Plus, I had help in the form of family for a sizeable chunk of this.  I live a relatively frugal life, and this is one step for my next financial goals.  With the cooking that I've been doing, more frugality is happening.  Plus, I track my expenses quite religiously, to make sure that I know where my money is going.

I've been doing some things to provide me with incentives to reach this goal.

1. The Bees

I started this in Thailand, after I read something on a blog about a woman coloring in circles whenever she was able to put a few hundred dollars into her loan.  I liked the idea of putting in whatever you can and celebrating that amount.  If I was in Thailand still, it may be more pertinent, but I came into some money when I left the school, and moving wasn't nearly as expensive as it has been in the past, given the school that I'm coming to.

Each little honeycomb represents just $100.  This picture is currently accurate, so when I've finished paying off my loans, I will have a fully colored picture.  I'm very excited about this.  My net worth is getting higher by the minute!

2. The socks.

In order for me to get more of my money invested in paying off these loans, Pierre and I thought of an incentive in the form of something I love: socks.  I wanted to buy many socks before I came, but he dissuaded me of the notion that that was a good use of money.

However, now I get a pair of socks whenever I pay $1000 dollars to my loans.  This is a very useful incentive for me.  Many of them are in the wash, but here are two of my recent success stories.

3. Net Worth.

A softer incentive is the net worth that is calculated on my Mint.com account.  It counts up all my assets, subtracts all my debts, and gives me a number.  Just a few years ago, it was negative.  My debts far surpassed my assets, which I found very upsetting.  But now, I'm not only up to a positive number, but every day gets a little bit better.

School is super expensive, and this moment in time will see me working on the newest years of my 30s to make some good money and put it in useful places.  I will be an adult yet.

Goal Update: Food Preparation

In an effort to work on two of my goals, learning to cook and eat the healthiest, I have taken some steps.

I have purchased a few things for my kitchen (since all my things have arrived, and my kitchen still has not all the things.

1. A hand blender and food processor combo, which helps me make soup.
2. A multi-cooker, which I still don't know how to use.
3. A kitchen scale, because I had a recipe that required a weight that I didn't know.
4. A grill pan, because eggplant needs grilled.

I have so far created the following things in my kitchen:

1. Soup with zucchini, peppers, and carrots.
2. Roasted pumpkin soup.
3. Some version of ratatouille.
4. Ravioli.
5. Broccoli (in a pan)
6. Spinach (in a pan)

Pumpkin soup!

Carroty Veggie Soup!

Frozen Ratatouille!

A Fridge Full of Veg!

The goal is to have a bunch of healthy food stocked up in the freezer for some nice dinners, and it is working!  I have more than two weeks of food in my freezer, and a whole bunch of really nice green food in my fridge.

There is the added benefit of the mind stretch in cooking abroad.  My brain is trying to convert units and measurements, which isn't always the easiest thing.  There's the added challenge of finding what I need with the translator app on my phone, and utilizing the help of the ladies in the grocery store.  I feel like an explorer.

I know many of my friends and family aren't going to believe me... but... I'm kind of getting into this. Today, I'm excited that I'm going to cook.  I'm trying to cook eggplant in three different ways today.  Plus, with all of this, I'm losing weight and I feel healthy.  I also notice that the kitchen (and therefore my home) warms up quite a bit with the cooking, especially since they haven't turned the heat on.  And, I smelled the spice cabinet... and it reminds me of mom's house.

The Oven

I have made an amazing achievement.  I have learned to use my oven.

This may not sound like the most thrilling thing, but let me express some of the things that happened in order to make this happen.  I may also add that this is one of my goals, and this is evidence of progress.  More to come on that later. 

This is my oven:

Exhibit 1: Oven

It is a gas oven, which is something I have never encountered.

I have, on the left, a dial and a button that I thought was a flame button.  Given that I turn the dial and click the flame button for the burners, I thought that this was the case.  However, no.  This dial is more for heat, and the button just starts the gas. 

So, I'm consulting with my boyfriend, Pierre, because he is European and probably has encountered an oven such as this.  May I add that he was very useful in helping me learn how my dryer worked.

First, I wonder to myself how I even make this work, especially without blowing myself up in a fiery gas burning death. 

I try to turn the dial, I click the button.  I click the other button.  I wait. I look. I listen. 

Turning on the gas dial does nothing, I notice.  I hear nothing. No sounds of gas, no anything.  This is a good sign. 

Exhibit 2: Dial, Button.

I consult with Pierre, who recognizes the dial as something about the heat.  There is a measurement where you multiply this by some number to acquire a temperature in Celsius.  I disregard this information until it is more useful.

I look inside the oven, to see if there is an easy place to light the oven. 

Exhibit 3: Oven Innards.

The holes in the front are just too small for a lighter, and I actually only have a small lighter at this time.  So, this wasn't going to work.  I take a moment to re-read information shared over Facebook from the new people, because I know that I am not the only person with this issue. 

Then, I move the bottom tray, which slides out quite easily. 

Exhibit 4: The "Aha" Moment.

I see where the gas comes out.  I see the flame marks.  I see everything.

I notice that pushing the button near the dial means that I hear the sound of gas, and that is confirmed with the view that I currently have. 

I know what I need to do.

It was time for me to take my life in my hands and light the gas oven.  With a lighter: a small, normal lighter.

I click the button, hold it down, and slowly move the lighter closer to the area.  With a whoosh, it lights up.  After a brief moment of celebration, I lift up on the button to survey the handiwork.

The flame... dies.

I think to myself, perhaps I need to press it longer. 

So, I press the button again, bringing the lighter to the tube, holding the button longer and longer.  I light the tube, it whooshes up.  I wait, holding the button.

The flame dies again.

Exhibit 4: Just... stay.... please.

I do it again. I press the gas button, light the tube, reach with my foot to close the window (just in case), hold the button, put the tray back in (for flame protection), hold the button more, and after a few minutes, release.

Success.

SUCCESS!

And now, this:

Exhibit 5: Roasting Pumpkins

So far, I have roasted carrots and pumpkins in this oven.  With many more things to come.

I am progressing with my goals to create food in my kitchen.