I like fruit

I know it has been forever since I wrote anything on this blog, but this is the food blog, and I want to write about food today. Just because of a fun little hobby I have picked up over the last six months or so. It's very related to scrapbooking, in that they are both paper crafts, but it's much more random. So random, I just follow prompts placed almost every day on a website called daisyyellowsquarespace.com. And that's more prompts than I can take in, since life, scrapbooking, and yes, sometimes cooking and even things I find less interesting get in the way.

The prompts are a little slower than usual right now, because the usual host is on vacation. But one of her partners in art journaling is posting prompts about making lists of things for her. Although I  have been participating in the weekly "list prompts" posted by the usual blogger or her guest, one week is just simply a list. Another week started out that way, but I have added doodling, mist and glitter glue and it looks OK. Two of the lists were immediately interpreted in more artistic ways. But, I have only photographed the last of these, because it's the only one of the four lists I finished soon enough to feel right about sharing it. So, here is - in somewhat keeping with the prompt on daisyyellowsquarespace.com - my illustrated list of sweet and fruity fruits.

Beyond oatmeal

I am a fan of healthy eating, and one person whose opinion about this I respect is Bob Harper, the veteran fitness coach on the NBC television show "The Biggest Loser." Bob also gives tips for those of us who don't need to lose 50, 100 or more pounds but still could benefit from more exercise and healthier eating. On the side of healthier eating, one thing he recommends is starting your morning out with oatmeal. I don't know if he's gone Paleo, but this is an especially good tip if you are Paleo, because most breakfast cereals are not part of a Paleo diet.

But oatmeal doesn't have to be eaten by itself. You can top off your oatmeal with fruit, brown sugar or maple syrup. Buy a box of the variety instant oatmeal, and you have that already. I prefer the Quaker oatmeal in the round box. The quick-cooking variety takes no longer than instant oatmeal to cook. You can add fresh fruit and the other toppings.

I recently came upon a collection of recipes in one of my cookbooks that had a lot more than these toppings. Nuts. Chocolate chips. Coconut. I did something like this. I added pecans, chocolate covered raisins and coconut that was past its prime (tastes very good soaked in oatmeal and milk.). This was one of the tastiest bowls of oatmeal ever, and definitely the crunchiest.  I don't know if Bob Harper would approve, but i don't think there is anything bad in my toppings, especially since that chocolate on the raisins was dark chocolate. Yum.

Los Angeles County Fair time!

For several years now, I have been thinking about entering my banana nut bread into the Los Angeles County Fair. That's because even before then, Don has really praised this bread of mine. What has stopped me? The fact that I haven't entered ANYTHING into a county fair since I was in high school, and no home ec projects since I was in junior high school. (My junior year in high school I entered a science project.) I kind of thought entering county fairs were for kids and retirees. The fact that the Los Angeles County Fair is larger than even the California State Fair didn't change my mind. I just figured there were lots of kids and retirees in southern California entering stuff.

But a few things have changed my mind in the past year. First of all, in 2011 a former friend of mine, Sarah, entered something. I can't remember what, and we didn't go to the fair. Sarah is a 30-something who is into all kinds of culinary coolness. I especially like her Asian food creations, (she is the American born child of Chinese immigrants) but I don't think Asian Food is a category you can enter at the fair.

Second of all, I have won a cooking competition in the past year. The Sandals Cupcake Wars competition gave me the opportunity to win the "best cake" award.

Thirdly, somewhere in between the last county fair and the Cupcake Wars, or maybe shortly before or after, I knew I wanted to make myself more well known as a foodie. If I have food on display at this very well-attended fair, perhaps with a ribbon on it, that would help!

So I am going to enter the banana nut bread, at long last. Since those wonderful cupcakes were based on a pumpkin bread recipe, I am also going to enter pumpkin bread, with the same secret ingredient (fresh pumpkin instead of canned) my winning cupcakes had.

I have until August 3 to figure out if I want to enter anything else. I would really LOVE to make the pumpkin bread as cupcakes again and enter it into two other cooking contests the Los Angeles County Fair is having this year. That's the pumpkin recipe contest and its own version of Cupcake Wars, the Cupcake Baking Contest. But, I think having already been entered into Sandals' competition, I would be breaking the rules if I entered the exact same cupcake into either of these fair competitions. But I'm keeping an open mind. If I stumble upon another fabulous pumpkin recipe or another fabulous cupcake recipe, and can prove to myself either is so wonderful I have to share the finished creation with complete strangers, I will enter one of those contests too. Or maybe one of the many others.

If you live in southern California, and would like to enter something in the Los Angeles County Fair too, here is more information.

Macaroni without cheese

This is not for vegans or paleos, but for anyone who just wants a low-calorie pasta in a creamy sauce, I present to you pasta without cheese. This is modified from one of my older cookbooks.

PASTA WITHOUT CHEESE

Cook 1/2 package of pasta, (i.e. macaroni, rigatone, shells, penne) according to package directions.

Make white sauce by blending 1 Tbsp. flour, 1 Tbsp melted butter in skillet. Add up to 1 cup milk, until your white sauce is desired consistency. Add a little salt and pepper, and a squirt of brown or Dijon mustard.

You may add the pasta after blending a little milk and the seasonings into the sauce, or you may add your cooked macaroni into the finished sauce.

You can add other things. I added ham. You can even add cheese if you want to, but then it's more like a traditional macaroni and cheese, especially if you used macaroni.

Chicken and olives with pine nuts

Allrecipes.com's chicken and olives -

which has key differences from the one I made

Don and I just enjoyed what I had hoped would be our Valentine's Day dinner. I actually had great ideas for this dinner, and I actually had planned on serving it not one, but two days ago. First, I'll share the recipe. Then I'll explain why this ended up moving from Monday to Tuesday, and finally, Wednesday on my menu plan.

Chicken with Olives

For Two

1/2 cup pine nuts

1 Tbsp. oil

4 chicken thighs (or two chicken legs)

1/2 cup of green olives

1/2 tsp of sage

1/4 cup water

Toast the pine nuts over medium heat in a 10" skillet, shaking often. Remove from pan.

Heat oil, brown chicken on all sides. It should take at least 10 minutes. Remove from pan, drain fat from pan.

Return chicken and nuts to pan. Add olives, sage and water, continue cooking over medium heat for 30 minutes or until meat closest to bone is not pink.

I was cutting a cookbook recipe down to one-fourth for this, but the pine nuts I only cut from 2/3 a cup to 1/2, because I wanted to use all of the pine nuts in my small package. I wasn't sure if this was going to make too many pine nuts, but I ended up pleasantly surprised. The pine nuts absorbed so much chicken juice, what I ended up with reminded me of quinona, a grain I have had the pleasure of eating once. (I've had pine nuts before, but not so much in one serving.)

Delicious! I served it with cranberry sauce, because this was our Valentine's Day dinner, and something reddish seemed good.

So why didn't Don and I celebrate Valentine's Day yesterday like everyone else? Because he had school last night. So we knew Tuesday wasn't going to leave us time for a romantic Valentine's Day meal. That's why I had initially planned this meal for Monday. Monday was supposed to have been a less busy day than today, as we have church small group tonight and will be leaving for that soon. Sooner than usual, because we are going to hold it in a Riverside hospital to pray for the seriously ill daughter of one of our members.

Monday ended up not working out either. I made some homemade soup for dinner last Saturday, and had leftovers. I had another bowl for lunch on Monday, but Don insisted he wanted to have his bowl for dinner. I thought we had enough for two more bowls, so when Don didn't want dinner right away, I decided to wait. And wait I did until 7:40 p.m. At that time, he came into the kitchen, heated up the soup, and poured it all into one bowl!

I didn't really want to start cooking at 7:40 p.m., so I ended up going out for take-out Chinese. Don pleaded very hard that I would instead go to his favorite takeout, Subway sandwiches. He even wanted me to get him a sandwich "while I was there." Luckily, Chinese is in the same shopping center as Subway, so it wasn't hard to go both places.

I am a little disappointed how Monday's dinner ended up. But not surprised. There have been many years where I wanted to do something romantic for Valentine's Day or another holiday. But Don just doesn't tie romance to meals. I could go on and on about that. At least he does appreciate my good meals, when I get a chance to make them.

Addendum: I just checked the emails one of my favorite recipe websites, Allrecipes.com sends me on a regular basis. They were sending their favorite Valentine's Day main dishes, and one of theirs is a different chicken and olives recipes. Theirs calls for chicken breasts seasoned with garlic and tarragon instead of red meat seasoned with sage, but it seems yummy too. Because photographing dishes has some challenges for me right now, I'm sharing a photo of their dish instead.

Organizing my home

In 2012, I am embarking on a big project that has, or at least had, a little too do with cooking. It's called the 52-Week Home Organization Challenge. Each Monday, I have received a prompt for organzing some part of the house. The first four weeks dealt with the kitchen - counters, cupboards, the pantry and the refrigerator. I actually had to deal with reorganizing my pantry in Week 1 in order to get a ton of food off the counter, but Week 3 led to some interesting discoveries about how old my spices were, and a reorganization of what I didn't throw out from my spice rack.

Weeks 1 and 2 both resulted in some cute new accessories for me. They are the storage container box and the canisters pictured above. Of course, I had to be cheap in these endeavours, just as I am with food. The canisters are from Goodwill. And the storage box is the very box 2/3 of my excessive collection of storage containers came in. It had been just sitting there on the counter looking ugly for a long time. Meanwhile, I've had a collection of pattern paper in several different colors sitting in my stash since 2005, and it didn't seem like the yellow ones would be used on a layout anytime soon. So, they're now covering my box!

I believe the 52-Week Organization Challenge moves on to a different part of the house next week. I hope I accomplish as much with the future challenges as I did with the first four. (Although I was actually pleasantly surprised about how little food had to go when I cleaned out the fridge!) I am not sure how the rest will go, because I live with a packrat, and I am a bit of one too. If it had been up to me, we'd only have as many storage containers as actually fit in that box. I also would have gotten rid of some of the coffee cups and other items cluttering up two shelves in my dining room, and a collection of magnets cluttering up the front of my refrigerator. But Don wants to keep all of these things, so we still have them. Hopefully, his collections won't stop me from improving the rest of the house.

I know one room that can be improved without his blessing is my scrapbook room. As it doubles as the home office and his clothes closet, he would love to see some improvement there. He also would love to see it well enough organized that I don't keep hauling stuff into other rooms so I can work with it more easily. My hope is that the challenges for that area are broken into small enough pieces that I can do each in a week. Also, I think that's going to require an investment in a little more expensive storage than ceramic canisters, so I hope the funds will allow.

Healthy Lemon Bars

High fiber, no refined sugar or flour, and low cholesterol used to be key elements of a healthy diet. I still believe that to be the case, so that's why I like a recipe for Lemon Bars I adapted from one of my late 20th century health-conscious cookbooks. I made them and shared them with the Sandals' Women's Bible Study, and they were loved!

LEMON BARS

Crust:

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup margarine or butter

1 egg

1/4 cup crushed Wheaties

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

Mix together these ingredients and press into greased 8x8 pan.

Topping:

3 eggs

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup fresh lemon juice

1/ cup margarine or butter

1 teaspoon lemon peel

I actually had to use both margarine and butter in mine, because of a shortage of ingredients on hand. Next time, I will probably just use margarine as the original recipe called for. Another change to consider, for the sake of lower cholesterol, is to substitute two egg whites in the crust and four egg whites in the topping.

I love how the topping tasted with brown sugar, but because of it, these lemon bars don't have the intense yellow color you normally would associate with them. If you really want the yellow color, it can be had by substituting white sugar in the topping. There's no good reason I can think of to do this with the crust.