A New Direction

Sorry I've been so absent on this blog lately...but there's a very good reason for that.

See, back in November I decided to start Weight Watchers again. My weight started creeping up little by little and I knew I needed to get back to eating healthier and try and lose a few. Well, let's just say that Giada's recipes aren't exactly low fat!! So, I stopped cooking from her book.

I have, however, started cooking from a different book - a MUCH healthier one. It's called Hungry Girl 200 Under 200 - 200 Recipes Under 200 Calories by Lisa Lillien (aka Hungry Girl). Mike gave it to me for Christmas after I got hooked on the Hungry Girl website. I'm not sure how many of you have heard of it, but it's great. Lisa and her staff basically try to find low fat/low cal versions of things that still taste good. Plus, they're masters at creating recipes for things that we love at restaurants but making them a lot better for you. Plus, if you happen to be on Weight Watchers, she figures out all the Points for everything she talks about, which is awesome.

We've made several recipes from the book and the website, and everything has been good. Really good. And healthy. One of our favorites is for a swap for the Taco Bell Crunchwrap. Ya know, the little packet of goodness that looks like a 1960s flying saucer! Well, the actual Taco Bell version is, as you would imagine, not very healthy. She makes a version that's a fraction of the fat and calories. You'd think it would taste bad with all the reduced fat alternatives. But shockingly...it tasted pretty darn good. Very close to the original. We were impressed.

The other night, we even made her swap for the McDonald's McRib! I've never had a real McRib, so I can't compare, but the swap tasted good - even if there was fake meat in it. Mike said it's pretty close to the McDonald's version but the sauce is a little sweeter.

Anyway, aside from the swap recipes, there are just lots of other healthy but still yummy recipes. So in case you haven't guessed it, my new quest is to cook my way through this Hungry Girl book instead of Giada's. I will share with you my experiences and any cool products I discover in the process. Plus I'll warn you of anything yucky!

Recipe 17: The Turkey Before THE Turkey

About a week and a half before Thanksgiving I decided to try making Turkey Osso Buco.

It's basically a slow roasted half turkey breast with some finely chopped up veggies. Traditionally, Osso Buco is made with a veal shank. I was dying to try real Osso Buco in Italy. I ordered it at one restaurant, but since it was so close to closing time, the chef wouldn't make it for me. Sad! So, when I saw this turkey version in the cookbook, I thought I'd try it.

The reason I made it so close to Thanksgiving is because I'd been waiting for it to get cooler outside. I have no air conditioning in my apartment, and this recipe requires the oven to be on for quite a while.

You know how turkey has a reputation of being dry and tasteless? Well, this lived up to it. Did I do something wrong? I don't know. I've had such good luck with turkey since I started doing the brine thing a few years ago, but this was just blah and dry.

The highlight of the meal was actually a healthy side dish (not from Giada's book) I made. It was roasted cauliflower that was very good. Additionally, I made some delicious and very healthy turkey/veggie stir fry with the leftovers!

So, I'm not having very good luck with these recipes, and I'm WAY behind. I better step it up.

Here's a slightly blurry picture of the turkey for your viewing pleasure.

Recipes 15-16: Yummy, but a little too much rosemary!

On Saturday night, Mike and I enjoyed a lovely dinner of Pork Chops with Sweet Onion Marmellata with a side of Broiled Zucchini and Potatoes with Parmesan Crust.

It was all pretty tasty. However, have I ever mentioned that I don't enjoy rosemary too much? Well, I don't. And this meal had rosemary in every single element. So let's just say it was a tad overwhelming. Mike loved the herbiness of it, but I was actually trying to scrape some of off of the pork chop.

That being said, the pork chop was very good. It didn't get dried out at all, which was good. And the onion marmellata (basically slow cooking a bunch of onions for hours) was delicious! The recipe made about 4 times more than you needed to top the pork chops, so I'm going to freeze it and see if we can use it on something else. Out of these three elements, I could see making the onion part again and using it to top other types of meat.

Recipe 14: Yawn

Yes, it was as boring as the picture looks:

Orecchiette with Sausage, Beans and Mascarpone sounded really good. I like pasta. I like cheese. I like beans. I like sausage. How could you go wrong? It didn't taste bad, it was just really, really boring. I mean look at the picture - it's practically GREY! It actually tasted grey. I mean if colors had tastes, this dish was definitely grey!

Recipes 9-13: Success!

5 recipes...4 people...2 spring form pans!

I had Mike and my parents over for a nice dinner this weekend for a belated birthday celebration for my mom. The menu consisted of (and yes, the names of the dishes are links to the recipes on foodnetwork.com):

Red Pepper Cheesecake

Tuscan Stuffed Mushrooms

Eggplant Timbale (with Giada's marinara sauce)

Hazelnut Crunch Cake

I am happy to report that all of the recipes were delicious! It's always nice when you put a lot of work into cooking, and then everything actually tastes good! I will definitely make all of these recipes again. Oddly, dessert was my least favorite of the 5...and for those of you who know me, you'll be shocked right about now to hear that sentence come from me!!

I was a bit nervous about the savory roasted red pepper cheesecake, mainly because it contained one ingredient that I am not too fond of...goat cheese. I am a big fan of cheese for the most part, but goat cheese has a very odd flavor to it, don't you think? It's like a cross between rancid lemons and what I imagine a teenage boy's sweat sock would taste like. A bit of an exaggeration? I don't think so. The last time I tried goat cheese was on the Alaskan cruise I went on with my family several years ago. I saw it sitting there on the buffet and decided to try it again - maybe my taste buds had changed. So, I took a small slice of it, put it on a cracker, popped it in my mouth, and what did I taste? Sweat socks.

So, needless to say, I wasn't too excited about it being included in this recipe, but I used it anyway hoping it would be drowned out by the yumminess of the ricotta and cream cheeses. It was! We spread the cheesecake onto tiny multi-grain toasts (instead of the pitas the recipe called for) and it was very delicious. It didn't taste like sweat socks at all! And as the ultimate compliment, my dad, who is not the cheese fan that I am, actually liked it. I know, it's practically criminal not to like cheese. If I didn't look so much like him, I wouldn't think it was possible that I was related to him!

The second appetizer was Tuscan Stuffed Mushrooms. Yet another recipe with one item I was afraid of, thinking I didn't like...green olives. For years and years, I've said "I don't like green olives". But, mixed with all the other stuffing items, they were absolutely delicious. This may have been my favorite dish of the evening. Very tasty.

The main dish was Eggplant Timbale. It was one of the first recipes I noticed when I bought the book. The picture of it is so beautiful. You take grilled slices of eggplant and line a spring form pan with them. Then you stuff the middle of the pan with a pasta mixture and fold the eggplant slices back over the top - encasing the pasta mixture in eggplant. I wouldn't say this was a difficult dish to make, but it was rather complicated - a lot of steps.

First, it calls for marinara sauce, and I don't use jarred sauce anymore. I prefer to make my own in large batches and then freeze smaller portions of it. I use a recipe from Williams-Sonoma that is very simple and versatile. However, for this one, I decided to make Giada's recipe (knowing I'd have to do it eventually to cross it off the list). Oddly, her recipe has carrots, celery and a bay leaf in it. It was good, but it tasted more like really chunky tomato soup than typical Italian marinara sauce.

Next, I had to very precisely cut two eggplants into 1/4" slices and grill them. I have a very tiny portable grill which only held about 6 -8 slices of eggplant at a time, multiplied by 4 minutes per side, multiplied by about 5 batches. Yeah, that took a while. Meanwhile, I made the filling which was penne pasta, ground beef, Italian sausage, onions, peas, mozzarella cheese, Romano cheese, the previously made marinara sauce, Marsala wine and some herbs and spices.

Next came assembly time. In the book, Giada had eggplants that were a little taller than mine. The ones in stock at Ralph's that day were on the short and stubby side, which made it a bit tricky to line the spring form and still have the long tails hanging over the side. But, I made due. I lined the pan with eggplant, filled it up with the pasta mixture and put another layer of eggplant on top. Eventually, it baked for a little bit and then came The Big Unmolding. This was the scary part. I SO wanted it to look as beautiful as it did in the book, but I figured - even if it falls apart, it should still taste good. Even after I removed the side of the spring form pan, it was still standing, so that was a good sign. And then, drum roll please, I cut the first wedge out of the round. It held together for the most part! It didn't quite look as perfect as the one in the book, but I was pretty happy with it. I did accidentally drop a small piece of it down the sides of one of my cupboards, on to my foot and then on to the floor, but other than that - it was served, and everyone really enjoyed it! Yay! It was very tasty - definitely worth making again.

Finally, dessert was Hazelnut Crunch Cake. I actually baked this up the night before since it also had many steps to it. Luckily, the cake part of it was just a chocolate cake mix. Thanks to Betty Crocker, that part turned out just fine. The frosting was mascarpone cheese, cream, a little powdered sugar and some vanilla. Really good - not overly sweet like so many cake frostings. The "crunch" part was basically like a hazelnut brittle. The hardest part of this turned out to be trying to get the skins off the stupid nuts. Let's just say that they were only about half skinned because I lost my patience. So I made the brittle, chopped it up and folded it into the frosting and frosted the cake. Then there was a topping of ground up bittersweet chocolate, orange zest and a little sugar that got crumbled on the top.

It was pretty good, but I didn't like the crunchy stuff in the frosting. And I didn't care for the orange flavor in the crumble either. It would have been better if it was just the chocolate cake mix and the frosting without the crunch. But then, it would have been really hard for them to call it Hazelnut Crunch Cake without the hazelnut or the crunch!

Recipes 7-8: Picky Eater?

I never thought of myself as a picky eater. I like most things. I especially like cheese, chocolate and almost anything covered in cheese or chocolate. Recently, though, I've come to realize that there's quite a long list of things I don't enjoy very much.

Not all of it comes down to taste. A lot of it has to do with what I consider textural abnormalities. For example, I can't eat an entire banana because the texture starts to gross me out about half way through. Unless, that is, as mentioned above, it's covered in chocolate!! Also, as mentioned in a previous post, I don't like raisins, sun-dried tomatoes or any other dried fruit (and if those are covered in chocolate, I still don't like them, but I will eat the chocolate off of it)! Another thing I will almost always tell you with disgust that I don't like...salmon.

I like fish. I don't have a problem with it at all...but there's something about salmon that bothers me. I've often wondered if it was the pinkish color that made my mind somehow think it wasn't cooked. So, imagine my dread, when I let Mike pick this weekend's recipes and he chose Salmon with Puff Pastry and Pesto (oh, I don't like pesto either)!

I decided to go ahead and make it, giving salmon another chance (but having a backup plan of some other fish for me to eat, just in case). The recipe was a layered dish, puff pastry topped with pesto and tomatoes with the fish on top. I bought swordfish as my back-up plan. I think I got a bad piece, because it was so tough - it was awful! It was either try the salmon, or eat a piece of puff pastry for dinner.

So, I dug in (cautiously). Hmmm....not too bad. The flavor was fine, but after a couple of bites, I realized why I don't like salmon. Texture. It's a little too smushy and fatty. So, I could eat about 1 1/2 ounces of it before it got to be too much for me. Then I loaded up on the side dish of Spicy Parmesan Green Beans and Kale. This was delicious (a tiny bit too salty, but otherwise delicious). It had onions, cremini mushrooms, green beans, kale and other seasoning items...all sauteed together. Very good.

So, another semi-successful evening. Salmon and I might not be completely over, but it'll probably be a little while before we see each other again.

Recipe 6: Congealed Orzo

A few nights ago, I made Orzo with Sausage, Peppers and Tomatoes. It was orzo pasta (obviously), some Italian turkey sausage, tomatoes and jarred fire roasted red peppers. It was pretty good right after I made it, but turned a little strange the next day.

This is the first time I've ever seen a recipe that directs you to boil the pasta in a water/chicken broth combo. I assumed it would add a little flavor to the pasta, and thought it was a brilliant idea! That is, until I saw the very weird filmy substance that appeared on top of the water. You had to reserve the cooking liquid and use it to make the pasta a little saucier. That was actually a technique that the chefs used at our cooking class in Italy, so it seemed o.k. But as that water cooled a little while I put together the rest of the ingredients, it got a film on top of it, and it turned very thick.

But, I carried on and ate the dish, and was pleased with it.

However, the filmy, thick water proved to be a detriment the next day when I went to eat some leftovers for lunch. It had congealed into one Gladware-shaped brick! Even after heating it in the microwave, it was hard to get it to loosen up. I added some hot water to it, which helped. It still tasted pretty good, at least, it was just kind of strange.