pizza pockets!

Oh, hi. Here I am, grimacing in my somewhat cramped, (well, large for an apartment at least!) messy, humid kitchen. Today was a stupid day to make pizza pockets from scratch (like 85 degrees and humid, ugh) but it was on the menu and it sounded good, so I did it anyway. I fortified myself with a good afternoon snack (HA) and set to work making my pizza dough using this recipe.



Last time I made pizza, I made of spur of the moment decision to make a calzone, and it came out pretty darn delicious. This time I decided to make little hand-sized pizza pockets, mostly for fun, but also because this pizza dough recipe always makes way more than we need, so I knew I'd have enough to make extras to freeze for another day.



Making pizza pockets is pretty straightforward, but it kind of takes a long time, so I recommend two things: get your stuff prepped as far in advance as possible, and try doing it on a day that you don't mind having your oven cranked up to 500ºf- we're still recovering. Like, the middle of July might not be the right day for making pizza pockets. OR MAYBE IT IS, WHO CARES IF YOU GET SWEATY?

I made the dough according to the recipe, and then rolled it into a rope which I divided into 8 portions. I rolled out each little ball into a nice oval, like so:



and filled it halfway with the stuffing, which was a mixture of finely chopped cooked chicken, roasted broccoli, and roasted red peppers, stirred together with pizza sauce and some chunks of fresh mozzarella (grated probably would have worked better, though). I chopped everything pretty finely because I didn't want to run into the problem of taking a nice bite only to get a huge chunk of some searingly hot chicken or pepper or something that is too huge to fit in your mouth and then it just plops down in front of you and you're going FUHFUHFUHFUH trying to cool off your mouth- god, that sucks. If everything gets chopped up, you can take reasonable bites without hurting yourself. (They do get really hot, though.)



So, I made 8, split 6 of them between the 3 members of my family and popped 2 (uncooked) into the freezer for a day that I'm feeling too lazy to make lunch. Win-win situation, in my opinion. I baked them in a 500 degree oven on a cast-iron skillet (dusted with cornmeal!) for about 5-7 minutes, then I flipped them so the tops would get a little brown and let them cook for another minute or two. Next time I might use some sausage or ground beef, because let's face it- what I'm really trying to do here is replicate those ridiculously terrible/delicious pizza pockets that you get in your middle school cafeteria for like 50 cents. I lived off of those things in the 8th grade, even when I was "vegetarian" and i'd just bite off a corner of the pocket, squeeze all the sausage out, and then eat the cheesy, saucy bread. That stuff is the bomb! And I love the idea of basically having homemade hot pockets in my freezer, because I'd never BUY something like that (ew ew ew) but I secretly love to eat stuff like that. (because I'm still mentally like 10 years old.)

OH, and today, a good friend of our family and longtime graphic designer (he is the friend who helped me design my book of photographs), Hank Schmidt, sent out a preview of some cupcake wrappers he designed with a friend. I loved the idea and told him I wanted to design one, and he sent me the template! If you're familiar with my drawing blog, you'll know that I do freelance illustration, so I'm totally bubbling over with ideas for something to slap on a cupcake wrapper. Feel free to leave a comment with something you'd like to see wrapped around your cupcakes! You can see some of his existing designs here. (although I'm trying to convince him to open an etsy shop for these, I think it'd sell in a heartbeat.)

in defense of snacking.

Well, I haven't been up to much the last week or so- I was laid up with a snuffly cold (that I think I'm finally getting over) and then friends had birthdays and I had a wedding to shoot and phew- wasn't 4th of July fun? God, I love hot dogs and setting stuff on fire.

Anyway, uh... SNACKS! The virtues of snacking have been lost on me over the years. Having a kid has dramatically altered my eating habits in a variety of ways, but the most important has been that I've finally learned the importance of snacking. Not like, sneaking a candy bar on your lunch break, or "Whew, I'm hungry! Let's pop into Taco Bell and get like 3 soft tacos!" but like, the kind of snacks that sustain you between meals and don't make you feel like garbage.

I'm a self-diagnosed hypoglycemic. I know that most people wah-wah-wahhhhh at the words "self-diagnosed," but whatever, I don't need to have blood sugar monitoring in a doctor's office to tell me that I become a complete basketcase when my blood sugar plummets, it's really, REALLY apparent to the people around me. You can ask my close friends, my coworkers, my poor, dear, unbelievably understanding husband- any of them will tell you to shove a cookie in my mouth and run screaming when I start freaking out.

It starts innocently enough- usually I won't even realize I'm actually HUNGRY- I'll just start to feel weird. Then, when I start to get a little shaky and realize, "Oh shit, I need to eat, like RIGHT NOW." I begin attempting to formulate some kind of snack idea, but I start getting flustered and suddenly NOTHING SOUNDS GOOD, and I CAN'T EAT SOMETHING IF IT DOESN'T SOUND GOOD, AND OH MY GOD I NEED TO EAT RIGHT NOW AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON! In really dramatic instances, I start to get chills and I get really dizzy- I've even convinced myself that I'm coming down with the flu (my hypochondria might be the subject of another post) because I felt so sick, only to feel perfectly fine about 15 minutes after eating my first bite of food.

So, you get the idea. Needless to say, when I was pregnant, (and hungry EVERY SECOND OF THE DAY) I was not very fun to be around. Eventually, I had my kid, slowly weaned myself off of junk food snacks, and learned to keep my house stocked with healthy stuff. I started carrying a jar of almonds & raisins with me in my purse EVERYWHERE I GO, and I learned that my son turns into a cranky pile of crap when he doesn't snack, either. So, my day goes sort of like this:

8 a.m.: Breakfast!
10-10:30 a.m.: SNACK!
12ish: Lunch!
3p.m.: SNACK!
5-6ish: Dinner!

and then usually another small snack around 8 or 9 if I stay up late.

The morning snack is usually just a handful of crackers, a piece of fruit, or some nuts and raisins, but the AFTERNOON SNACK is the most important snack of the day for me. The afternoon snack can MAKE OR BREAK me by dinnertime, seriously. If I don't have a nibble around 3 or 4, by the time my husband gets home from work around 5 or 6, I'm usually flying around the kitchen, on the verge of tears, trying to figure out how to get shit done in time to eat dinner, and it is NOT pretty. There are so many times that he has had to pry a frying pan out of my hyperventilating grip, steer me away from the kitchen and quickly pull together dinner, it's not even funny.

So anyway, keeping nuts, fruit, and cheese in the house at all times saves me on a regular basis. It keeps me from freaking out and running to the store for a candy bar or something gross in a package, it keeps me from losing my shit on my poor unsuspecting family, and I feel like almost everyone could benefit from a good afternoon snack.

Keeping it under control, y'all.

summer salad.

This will be brief, as I'm currently languishing on my couch in a pile of self pity, struck down by some weird cold/allergy combo that is keeping my eyes nice and puffy and my chest somewhat rattly. The other day, when I was feeling 100% awesome, I called my parents to hang out and they invited me over for a nice little summer barbecue. They always tell us not to bring anything, but it always feels better to show up with a side dish, so I threw together this weird little experimental sardine/noodle-y/salad whatnot.

I have never been really into those giant buckets of mayonnaise-drenched noodles and tuna that sometimes show up at barbecues. It's not that they don't taste good, and they get bonus points for being familiar and nostalgic, but for some reason my brain screams, "FOOD POISONING!!!!" even though I know that it's not that dangerous. Anyway, on a hot day I don't really feel like chowing down mayo, so I like the lightly dressed salads with oils & vinegar.

Sardine & Noodle salad:

1 half a cucumber, seeded & diced
1 carrot, diced
1 or 2 celery stalks, diced
1 bunch of green onions, chopped
1 small shallot, diced
a handful of chopped fresh basil (parsley would be good, too)
1 tin of sardines packed in olive oil (or water, if that's what you like)
olive oil, a splash of vinegar (this day, I used apple cider, but if I'd had rice wine vinegar I probably would have tried that, to match up with the fish better)
salt & pepper to taste
cold cooked noodles

Mix it all together in a bowl, dress it with oil & vinegar until it tastes good, and keep it in the fridge until you're ready to eat it.

I made another batch of this yesterday for dinner, but since I literally could not smell or taste a thing all day yesterday, I cannot tell you if it was worth my trouble to make a small amount of garlic paste (made by smashing garlic up with some sea salt) and throwing it in, or if using a small amount of balsamic vinegar instead of apple cider made much of a difference. I am like 80% sure it was delicious, but alas- I could not taste it.

The reason I use tinned sardines instead of cans of tuna is that sardines are lower in mercury and considered generally more 'sustainable' than tuna. Plus, I just like them. They aren't fishy and weird, they aren't salty like cured anchovies, they just taste like flaky, slightly tuna-y canned fish. And, there's 26 grams of protein in one package, isn't that crazy!? I've been on a big sardine kick lately- they do an awesome job of keeping me full and happy for a long time, which is a really big deal for someone who is hypoglycemic and experiences blood sugar crashes pretty frequently.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sip hot chicken broth and stare out the window at the beautiful weather, hopefully I'll be feeling better by this weekend.

southern-inspired polenta.

Yesterday, our menu told me it was polenta + veg day. Usually when we have polenta, I just cook it according to the package directions, and serve with roasted vegetables and some kind of sauce, like pesto or red sauce. Last night, I just wasn't really in the mood for that.



I poked around in my cupboards aimlessly, trying to find some point of inspiration. Since it was Thursday- the day before we go grocery shopping, the pickings were getting pretty slim and I didn't want to cut into the burrito stuff for the following night, so I had to be careful. I rummaged around our spice cabinet and my hand came out holding a bag of filé powder. (sounds like feeee-lay. like those stupid-ass mcdonald's commercials.)

Suddenly, I got a craving for gumbo, but we didn't have any meat laying around to make it taste good. (YEAH, MEAT IS WHAT MAKES IT TASTE GOOD.) Then, the pieces all fell together in my brain and I realized I had enough stuff laying around to make some semblance of southern food- although I have to call it 'southern-inspired' so nobody kicks my ass for making hippie chow and calling it southern. This was basically just a pot of sauteed veggies with some bacon fat & some southern spices, served over polenta.

What's that? OH YEAH, I said BACON FAT.



Remember? From the other day when I fried hot dogs in it? Oh god. On Father's Day, I made my husband bacon & eggs for breakfast (and some pathetic, soggy, useless 'hash browns' but we'll talk about that another time) and I finally decided to save the bacon fat and use it for something else. I've been slipping it into stuff all week, not just my hot dogs, haha! It has recently come to my attention that lard is actually pretty good for you, compared to some of the alternatives. It's about half monounsaturated fats, which- if you're keeping track, are the "flat belly" fats that everyone is freaking out about in olive oil and dark chocolate and nuts. I plan to research it some more, but for now I'm using lard sparingly in my cooking, somewhat secure in the knowledge that my arteries aren't hardening as I type. And anyway, having some bacon fat around yesterday MADE MY DINNER, I can't lie. It would have tasted so boring and crappy without the bacon fat.



Oh, do you want a recipe instead of listening to me ramble? Fine.

Polenta with southern-inspired vegetables:

1 or 2 bell peppers- I had half a red one and a whole yellow one laying around so I used those. Dude, bell peppers are expensive, sorry. If you live in Portland, you should be shopping at Limbo anyway for a number of reasons, but one of my favorites is that they always have cheap-ass bell peppers. These were 75 cents, but sometimes they're like 50 cents, which is a lot nicer than the buck fifty or two bucks the regular store tries to charge.

1/2 a red onion (or white onion, whatever)
1 carrot
2 celery stalks
1 or 2 small zucchini
1 small yellow squash
some broccoli
a clove or two of garlic, although I have to admit that I forgot to put any in and I didn't even notice. But if I weren't cooking in a hurry next time, I'd add some. Because garlic is delicious.

2 tablespoons, more or less, rendered bacon fat. (Start keeping some in your fridge! Have BLTs for dinner and save the fat in a jar, it's worth it.)

1 can of tomato sauce

some chili powder, a couple generous pinches of filé powder, garlic powder, a bay leaf if you have it, (I didn't have any and it was fine) salt & pepper to taste.

In a large pot with some hot oil, saute onions, garlic, carrots, celery, and bell peppers until they begin to soften, then add zucchini and squash and whatever else. (I waited to add the zucchini & squash because there's always so much water released from cooking it, I didn't want the other vegetables to get soggy.) Stir in a tablespoon or two of bacon fat and inhale deeply, thinking to yourself- "GOD, I LOVE BACON." Add the can of tomato sauce and season with a pinch of chili powder (I didn't go crazy on chili powder, just a generous sprinkle will do), some filé powder (a tablespoon? 2 tablespoons? I don't know.) garlic powder, and salt & pepper. Taste, and adjust seasoning to your liking- I ended up adding more bacon fat towards the end so it'd have more of a smoky flavor. Allow to simmer for awhile.

For the polenta, you can just cook according to the directions (we buy Bob's Red Mill, and it's like 3 cups of water to 1 cup of polenta- just bring water to a boil, stir in polenta, and simmer, stirring frequently.) or if you're feeling fancy (like I sort of was) you can saute some veggies in the pan (I did finely chopped carrot, celery, onions, & shallot) and then add the water, bring to a boil, then add polenta. When the polenta got really thick, I stirred in some cheddar cheese- I was going for a cornbread type thing. Spoon into dishes to cool, then turn out onto a plate and serve with veggies in the tomato-y gravy.



I was so pumped on this because I usually fail miserably at weird, improvisational food, but this came out pretty awesome. I blame bacon. Normally I try to offer an idea on how to make something vegetarian, but honestly, the smoky flavor of southern cooking comes from cured/smoked meats, sorry guys. You could probably just add liquid smoke, but for some reason the idea of liquid smoke really grosses me out. If you don't have bacon fat handy, you could just pick up andouille sausage, and then it would just basically be gumbo. Yum!

holy meatball.

This isn't the first time I've posted about meatball sandwiches. Frankly, it might not be the last. Dude, have you HAD a meatball sandwich lately? God, they're so good.



This post is here mainly to talk about this bread. Have you ever had banh mi? These sandwiches have only recently been brought to my attention, and now whenever I have the chance, I like to stop into a local bakery that sells them at lunch time and meet my husband for a few bites of awesome spicy pork. Yesterday we were lucky to both be free at the same time, and when we stood there chatting with the hilarious little girl who works behind the counter, I reminded him that we had meatball subs on our menu for dinner. He snagged this bag of rolls, the same ones they use for their sandwiches, and brought them home.



He stopped at the grocery store on the way home and picked up some ground beef and some pork sausage, mixed them together in a giant bowl with bread crumb, fresh basil, diced onions & garlic. (AND THIS REVELATION: HE SAUTEED THE ONIONS BEFORE ADDING THEM TO THE MEATBALL. WHAT?! THIS SERIOUSLY NEVER CROSSED MY MIND BUT IT IS QUITE CLEARLY THE ANSWER TO SUPERIOR MEATBALLS. They were lightly caramelized and perfect when he mixed them in, and as a result the meatballs were moist, the texture was flawless, and I am never adding raw onions to meat again. He also admitted to me that he picked up this tip NOT from his fancy culinary education, but from a certain, slightly douche-y tv chef that I will not name who may or may not be Tyler Florence, hahaha)



Mush the meat together in a bowl with all the other stuff, then form into balls and fry in a pan with oil, adding a splash of red wine halfway through. Brown the balls on all sides, then put a lid on the pan to steam them up and help them cook faster. When they seem to be nearly done, dump in some pasta sauce and turn the heat down to a low simmer.



Here's my son screwing around with my plate. Do kids ever stop TOUCHING EVERY SINGLE THING THEY SEE? I know the answer is no, but I felt like begging the universe for an answer anyway.



I mean, the meatballs were obviously the star of the show- mixing in pork sausage keeps them moist and adds tons of flavor. I like it when the pasta sauce cooks down into that dark, sludgy red goo, streaked with grease, not gonna lie. But, aside from all that goodness, these banh mi loaves held up FANTASTICALLY to all that messy goodness, while still being fluffy and lightly crisp on the outside. If you have a Vietnamese bakery in your neighborhood, see if you can get your hands on these loaves, they're a mixture of wheat & rice flour that makes them so light- I've even heard people describe them as "shattering" when you bite into them. It's amazing to me that they manage to hold that much sauce without falling apart, but you don't have to tear them to death with your teeth to get a bite, either. Oh, and that bag of 5 loaves cost 2 effing bucks, WHAT THE HELL? Portlanders, get thee to An Xuyen, order the pulled pork (or pork with lemongrass, or meatball) sandwich for a whopping $2.75 (or was it $2.25? either way, under 3 bucks) and grab a bag of these bad boys. And a steam bun. And chat up the little girl behind the counter, because she's my new best friend.

exactly what it looks like.

Why yes, I did just have hot dogs fried in bacon fat on toast (fried in bacon fat) for lunch. Thanks for asking.

burrito night.

So, in keeping with my previous post about weekly dinners, here's our #1 standard dinner. It's cheap, easy as hell, and filling. Duhhhh, burritos! As we get terrifyingly closer to buying our first home (no jinx! no jinx!), this will probably be on the menu like 3 times a week. BEANS AND RICE 4 LYFE, SUCKAS. All my adorable mumbo jumbo about budgeting is going to get thrown out the window when we buy a house, because our rent is basically going to double no matter what- good bye, fancy eggs! We are lucky to have found a really cheap apartment a few years ago and the rent hasn't really gone up with the rest of the neighborhood. BUT, whatever- we're here to talk about food.



First of all- "Burrito night." I know it's dorky, but along with enjoying family meals at the table, I like to keep a sense of order and consistency in my kid's world by referring to dinners like, "Burrito night! Pizza night! Noodle night!" etc. I feel like it will give him something to look forward to when he's a little older and give him a sense of family stability and BLAH BLAH BLAH- I am totally over-thinking this. So, burrito night, it happens every week. We usually time it so that it falls on a night that I babysit, which means that my friends probably think we eat NOTHING BUT BURRITOS, since I always drop their daughter off in the evening with the sendoff, "She had a burrito!" The reason we time it this way is that burrito night basically = opening a bunch of cans and rolling shit up in a tortilla. I'm not gonna lie, this is the laziest night of my week. The only way we could get lazier would be to go to an actual burrito shop, which we occasionally throw up our hands in exhaustion and do, (we're only human!) but why pay 15 bucks for 3 burritos when the basic elements of this meal total up to like 5 dollars?



A recent phone call with my mother revealed that she doesn't know how to make spanish rice from scratch. I can't fault her for this- I didn't know either until I met my husband. I feel like this is one of those things everybody should know how to do, like boil an egg (hey, I learned to do this last year!) or like, wipe their own butt. We make spanish rice from things that we always have around the house. Look, I'm not even going to bother looking up a recipe for this or pretending like I know anything about spanish rice, so spare me your "MY MEXICAN GRANDMA DOES IT LIKE THIS, AND YOU ARE DOING THIS WRONG, BLAH BLAH BLAH." I don't care- this is how we make it, it tastes good in our burritos.



More moments of confession: I am a sloppy-ass cook. I don't really measure anything, I eyeball everything, and if it doesn't come out just right, I eat it anyway. I kind of apply the same logic to cooking that I do when I cut my own hair- YOU JUST HAVE TO BE COOL WITH THE IDEA OF SHAVING YOUR WHOLE HEAD, AND THEN YOU CAN GO AHEAD AND CUT YOUR OWN HAIR. In short, if you screw it up, it's not the end of the world. Deal with it, or start over.



Sorry, I just have a lot of pictures to show off. I used 2 cans of beans last night because I wanted leftovers for lunch today.

ANYWAY MAKE SOME SPANISH RICE:

about a cup of rice
1 can of fire roasted diced tomatoes (these are so good! i know i'm all boo-hoo-no-processed-food but sometimes you need some damn canned tomatoes.)
1 onion
some garlic
handful of chili powder
smaller handful of cumin
bay leaf (i didn't have any yesterday, bummerrrr)
a little water

In a large pan, saute onions and garlic until they begin to soften. Dump in the rice and spices, and toast for a minute or two. Dump in the can of tomatoes, stir it around, and then dump in like a can's worth of water or so. You just want to make sure the rice is covered with liquid, but err on the side of a teeny bit more, because overcooked gummy rice is preferable, in my opinion- to crunchy undercooked rice.

Stir it around and put a bay leaf in, then drop a lid on it. Stir a couple of times to make sure it doesn't stick, and in about 20 minutes or so you have a big ass fluffy pan of spanish rice. You can also use stock instead of water but it's not a huge deal. It does taste better, though. THERE- stop using a box now, mom. You don't need all that sodium in your life. OH YEAH speaking of sodium, make sure you remember to salt your rice. I always forget and then my husband is all, "UGH, PASS THE SALT."



Anyway, oh hey- do you know how to fold a burrito? Sure, you could just do tacos, but there's just something about the meal-in-the-palm-of-your-hand that is a burrito that is so dang satisfying. I worked at some crappy local taco chain when I was a teenager, rolling burritos all day, so I like to think that I'm pretty darn good at it. I tried to do a little photo essay describing my method, but damn if it isn't a pain in the butt to try and photograph yourself ROLLING A BURRITO ONE-HANDED.

Basically, you tuck in the sides first:



And then you grab the end closest to you and fold it over so it touches the other end, and then tuck it under.



Then you just kind of keep pinching the sides in and roll the whole thing up, it's really satisfying, okay? This method works really good with spring rolls, too.

Heat up the tortilla on a cast iron skillet, dump some food inside, (CHEESE. BEANS. RICE.) and roll it up. TA DA. Burrito night.



Sometimes if we're feeling ritzy we'll buy sour cream or avocado, but usually it's just beans, cheese and rice, because come on- what do I look like, a millionaire?

HEY SPEAKING OF MILLIONAIRES- I got an inquiry about joining an ad network owned by General Mills. If I can figure out how to deal with the fancy sign-up website, I will probably throw some ads onto the sidebar there- but if it doesn't pay more than google ads I'll probably just dump it, because in case you noticed the google ads I had up there- I was literally raking in PENNIES A DAY. Like, one or two pennies a day, literally. What a waste of space! That had been there for months and months, and I still didn't have enough racked up for them to cut me a check, because they have a minimum. Whatever! Don't hate on my corporate sponsorship, y'all- I have to pay for my kid's Nike Airs somehow, and this 8 dollar carton of eggs isn't going to pay for itself.