Unintended Nachos

Monday, July 28, 2014

Setting kale for a new era of eating

I've been struggling with stomachaches for the last several years. Nothing debilitating, most of the time, but definitely not something I want to live with for the rest of my life. The pattern was random - I could go a week or two and be fine, and then the next week would be terrible. I long suspected some sort of food intolerance was at stake, but I didn't know what. A few gluten and/or lactose free friends encouraged me to try an elimination diet, or just try eliminating one thing at a time until I found it. However, not wanting to give up my favorite foods, and not liking the prospect of randomly eliminating things for a couple weeks a at a time until something changed, I decided to get a blood food allergy test. While not 100% accurate, these tests look for antibodies in the blood specific to foods, and can offer a good starting point for anyone wishing to locate food intolerances.

The results that came back were not altogether surprising, but also weren't things I would have thought to pinpoint on my own. While I had figured I had a problem with eggs, I hadn't suspected bananas, cranberries, pineapple, mushrooms or broccoli - nor would most of these be eliminated in a standard elimination diet. I've since stopped eating any of these things and am feeling a good deal better. At some point I'll try them all again to look for false positives, but that's beside the point.

The point is, knowing I had some foods I needed to avoid gave me the motivation to really start rethinking how and what I eat. I wanted to start eating better food (healthier, more delicious, better quality, all of the above). Where better to start than with the stereotypical superfood, kale? I mean, they're putting it in everything these days!

(Credit to Theo's Chocolate for this image)

Okay, my thought process was less intentional than that. It started with "Oh, I should get produce from the farmer's market". A delicious bag of mixed greens from a stand I didn't know led me to go back to that stand to buy more greens. But alas, they didn't have any mixed greens.

What did they have? Kale. Lots and lots of kale.

It was cheap and plentiful, so I decided to try it. After listening to a long list of ideas for how to eat kale (from the seller and a loving customer who happened to walk up at the time), and a description of the different kinds of kale - because apparently such a thing exists - I bought a bundle of White Russian Kale to try.

Sadly, White Russian Kale isn't nearly as tasty on its own as the standard White Russian drink, but it's probably a good deal healthier, and there's nothing wrong with consuming white russian kale at work.

So there's that.

Per instructions, I put the kale in some water to freshen it up - in this case, a pyrex pan of water.

It eventually came time to inspect the kale, and I quickly discovered that kale is a very strange plant. Here you see leaves growing out of the leaves.

Go home, kale, you're drunk.

It was probably all the White Russians.

Since I didn't really feel like cooking things, I decided to make a kale salad for lunch. One of the suggestions was kale and strawberries, and there were some strawberries lying around my apartment that needed to get eaten (thanks roommate), so, well, perfect.

Kale slicing was easy with a sharp knife. You slice down the edge of the stalk to get the leafy bits.

Insert a few strawberries, slightly bruised, but otherwise delicious.

I also have to throw in a mention of my beautiful bento box. It's beautiful, I love it, and at some point I'll do a spotlight on things I'm doing with it. But right now, just enjoy its beauty.

Sliced strawberries, inserted into bento box, stuck it all in the fridge and brought it for work the next day.

Fun fact: kale is very tough. Its not so tough to eat, because teeth are awesome, but I did manage to break my beloved plastic travel spork while trying to eat this salad. So use caution.

It was, however, delicious.

About a week later, I realized that the kale was still hanging out on my counter, in its pyrex pan. It was a little less green at this point, and I figured it needed using, so I decided to use the rest for a food I'd heard all too much about at this point: kale chips.

Again with the kale slicing. This time I added a bunch of olive oil and some salt.

Spread it out on the cast iron pan that currently lives in my oven, and roasted it for about half an hour at 350 degrees F.

It tasted a little bland, so I added a little garlic powder, and then the chips were fantastic. My intention had been to save them for a snack for the camping trip I was leaving for the next morning...

But I made the mistake of making them before making dinner (at about 8pm). A few still got saved, but a lot got eaten. They were delicious.

I did decide, though, that they probably would have been better with kale that wasn't mostly wilted. The really green chips were the best, the yellow and brown ones weren't as good.

I mean, really, don't you just want to eat all of that?

Random thought: one of my pet peeves when looking for recipes is food blogs that have tons of random pictures that I have to scroll through before I can see the recipe.

Look! Look! I made a food!

It was soon decided that what I needed to do was buy more kale, and just make a lot of chips out of it that night.

This time, when I went to the farmer's market, I got curly kale. The market vendor told me she prefers curly kale to White Russian kale for kale chips because the leaves hold their shape better instead of going kaput in the oven. I'm pretty sure those were her words.

As you can see, curly kale is even crazier looking than White Russian kale. It's just all... curls all over the place.

Same procedure, though. This time I just piled all the kale on the pan, and poured olive oil over it. Fatal error, I think. I ended up with way too much olive oil... but it was fine.

Holy reduction, Batman! I may have taken a few nibbles before taking this picture, but not *that* many.

The vendor was right - curly kale held its shape better. However, I think I still prefer White Russians.

Erm, kale. That's what I mean. It had a more pleasant flavor to it, and honestly, shape isn't as important to me as flavor.

Take what you will of that sentence.

As you may have guessed from the title and intro to this post, my diet is changing at the moment. Hopefully this means more blog posts and more adventurous blog posts, as I try to navigate baking without chicken eggs, and snacking without bananas. And, you know, figuring out how to pack a lunch for myself every day without getting bored or ending up with a really weird lunch.

Kale Chips

Ingredients
Kale
Olive Oil
Seasonings

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
Slice kale into smaller bits, removing the large stalk in the middle
Pile on a pan
Drizzle olive oil and top with seasonings
Bake until crispy, approximately 20 minutes, turning periodically (tongs are useful for this)
Eat, share, crumple up and sprinkle on popcorn, whatever your heart desires

I, for one, am going to go look for chocolate to eat with my chips. Sounds delicious.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

State of the Chicken Address

So from the title of this, you might have some idea of how long its been since I actually made this food. But we're going to ignore the fact that the State of the Union Address is something that happened in January, because, you know, its only been 5 months, to the day. That's not too long, right? I'd say something about how I'm going to get better at posting, but I think I say that all the time. To myself, if not publicly on my blog. Anyways, enough shaming myself for not being a good blogger. Onward, to food!

I remember last year, for the State of the Union, I was in college, and it was the first time I really put effort forth into watching the talk (rather than not watching, or just watching it with my parents). I'd made potstickers... I don't know why I remember that I'd made potstickers, but I had, and I sat down on the couch with my laptop on the table, eating my potstickers and watching the address, when my Chinese roommate walked in and wanted to know what we were watching. It was a fun moment, explaining it all to her, and I think she sat and watched with us for a bit, but that might be wishful thinking.

... right before I wrote about having made potstickers, I decided I was hungry for potstickers and put some rice in the rice cooker to eat with them potstickers when I'm done writing this. I swear it isn't correlated.

Anyways, this time around, I had similar thoughts about food. I had thawed a couple of chicken breasts, and I wanted to do something with chicken. Having no idea what to do with the chicken, I headed to Fridge Food and started looking for ideas. I found some truly terrible ones, including "teriyaki sauce" made only from mayonnaise and soy sauce. Seriously, if you venture into random recipe websites, use caution. And maybe common sense.

I did find a recipe that looked good eventually. It was a basic soy sauce, ginger and brown sugar marinade, fried and served with rice. With about an hour before the State of the Union was about to start, I mixed up the marinade with a tablespoon, because, well, why dirty more than one spoon?

Okay, 5 months later, I don't know why I took this picture. Look! Chicken!

I really hate handling raw chicken, but something that's made it way better is having kitchen scissors. It's way easier to cut chicken into bite sized chunks with kitchen scissors than with a knife, and the added benefit that you can cut it over a ceramic plate and then pop that right in the dishwasher...

... because salmonella is scary. And raw chicken / raw chicken juice smells really bad if you leave it out. I wish I could say I don't know this from experience.

Oh, also, I didn't have bowls in my new kitchen at this point. So everything was getting mixed in tupperware containers. That situation has since been rectified.

Once the chicken was marinading, it was time to start the rice, since the rice cooker takes around 20 minutes. I'm not sure exactly how long it takes, actually, I just know that right now, I'm hungry, and the rice cooker is taking way too long (by which I mean, my apartment smells deliciously of rice, but the rice isn't ready to eat yet).

As if to taunt myself further, here's a beautiful picture of cooked rice.

Growing up, I always cooked rice on the stove. Rice cookers felt like cheating (but mostly, I just didn't own one). Then sometime, not long before this rice cooker got purchased, a couple of Asian friends were saying that they don't know any Asians who don't use rice cookers.

Now... now I have a rice cooker and 2 crockpots. All the easy cooking can happen!

Once the chicken had been marinading for a while, I popped it on the stove, sauce and all. Since I haven't said it enough yet, Salmonella is scary. Cook your chicken until there's no pink in the middle. Cook all your meats thoroughly and make sure to wash anything that's touched raw meat really well. K?

I know you all need to see my beautiful bamboo rice paddle. I love it. I can't/shouldn't wash it in the dishwasher, but the feel of bamboo in my hands is worth it. (I also prefer bamboo knitting needles, I'm sure its related.)

I'm slowly curating a bamboo and red kitchen. It wasn't on purpose at first. It's starting to get more purposeful.

See, wasn't that easy? I made a food! It could use a little more color if it wants to look pretty, but I didn't need pretty, I needed food in my belly while I watched the president tell us how the Union is doing.

Oh wait, it was missing something. Meat and carbs isn't really a balanced meal, and all that salty needs some sweet to balance it out.

So, obviously, the solution is to eat pinapple straight out of the can with chopsticks, right?

Right.

Seriously, try it sometime, it's fun!

I didn't get to explain the State of the Union to anyone this time, but I did get to enjoy chatting about our thoughts on it with some knitting friends I met on the internet.

Hey! My rice is done! What timing!

State of the Chicken

Ingredients
4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.

Cut chicken into ~1 inch cubes (I recommend kitchen scissors!)
Combine all non-chicken ingredients, add chicken
Marinate 30 min. to 1 hour
Heat frying pan on high
Pour marinated chicken into heated pan, cook thoroughly (5-8 minutes)
Serve over rice

4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts, diced into 1 inch cubes
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.
Read more at http://myfridgefood.com/viewrecipe.aspx?recipe=20846#VkTZxieJXAcsjRFI.99

Ingredients

4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts, diced into 1 inch cubes
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.