A Culinary Adventure

As I've written in the past, the culinary realm is where my creativity falls short. I have never been a good cook, and while I can follow a recipe, it's always seemed a bigger hassle than what it's worth. As a part of "being good to me" this year I want to explore flavorful healthy food. Peter and I split equally the task of cooking but it's been quite a challenge to prepare quick (a must for our busy lifestyles) meals that fit the criterion of "healthy" and "flavorful". As I move away from the "utilitarian" view of food I've held for all these years and start to adopt "creative" it is my goal to become more self sustaining. I'm planning a garden this year (more on this later) and while I'm looking forward to growing my own food I'm left trying to figure out how better to funnel our resources toward healthier choices now. Two weeks ago I joined a co-op with a weekly buy in option. You make your produce purchase on Monday or Tuesday of each week and pick up the following Saturday. The mystery of never knowing exactly what will be included in the basket leaves me with feelings akin to Christmas; the mystery, the anticipation, the excitement!!! Here's our basket for this week:

It's crazy the amount of food we obtained for only $15! Adding to the fun is the task of building a weekly menu around whatever happens to be in our basket. Nearly all the recipes we are trying this week are new dishes we've never tried before. And thanks to SuperCook.com I didn't have to relent my desire for "nutritious and flavorful" in the name of "quick and easy".

Tofu Terrific

Like many people, as a result of our family’s shrinking budget over the last year, my husband and I find ourselves getting creative in the kitchen. Anyone who supports organic and local food knows that buying responsibly can also sometimes feel like buying expensively. In addition to our local coop, my husband and I shop at Whole Foods, a great store we more often lovingly refer to as Whole Paycheck. It’s been a challenge this year to continue to purchase the products we want, and part of our newly found creativity in the kitchen has taken the form of vegetarianism. While eating tofu, beans, and other non meat proteins is cheaper and certainly better for the environment, we still love our meat and occasionally partake (which makes us something the Food Network calls “Choositarians,” although I’m not sure how technical that term is).

While we’ve eaten a lot of foods deemed “vegetarian” by American culture for a long while, tofu is one we admit we’re just starting to tackle. It has recently found a larger and larger place in our lives, much to our happy surprise. We’d had it plenty of times in restaurants and others’ homes, but we never considered ourselves to be FTCAOCPECE (Future Tofu Chefs of America and Other Countries for the Purposes of Environmentalism and Cost Effectiveness) material.

Being a tofu eater is something I never would have expected as a youngster growing up in the Midwest. My idea of soy back then was the oily soy cheese found on top of a chicken patty in our school’s cafeteria. If you’ve ever been to an all-you-can-eat buffet in the middle of Iowa, you know that the largest food group is meat/gelatinous “salads.” Okay, so that is encouraging a stereotype... but it's a pretty good stereotype. Where I grew up, meat is not only essential to the meal, it’s the main part. Tofu was not only not eaten in the household I grew up, but it wasn’t exactly looked upon favorably, either.

Fast forwarding (or rewinding, I’m not sure which since I was just flashing back to childhood, but am now talking about yesterday) to last night, I made the yummiest tofu lasagna after I found some hints online. Thought I’d share, because the results were great. Note, you also need a really great sous-chef, like mine pictured here:

My sous-chef, linebacker baby Jonas.

Unfortunately, he tries to cook with his feet as much as his hands.

I bought a package of extra firm tofu (which even at Whole Paycheck on the east coast only costs $1.99), which I then crumbled up into small pieces; it looked like something between feta and ricotta cheese. Then I mixed an equal amount of ricotta into it. At this point, any ravenous meat-eating bystander would think it was a whole bowl of ricotta cheese, the tofu is so disguised.

Tofu is great because it soaks up the flavors of food around it. I put some garlic salt (depends on how big of a lasagna you’re making, but I put in about a teaspoon) and chopped up basil into the ricotta/tofu mixture to give the tofu a flavor to absorb. (I like the flavor of tofu alone, don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t quite go with lasagna, so you sort of don’t want it to be the main flavor.) If you don’t want to do that, I just suggest using a very flavorful tomato sauce in the lasagna. The rest of the lasagna I made the same. Layering noodles and cheese and veggies/sauce, etc.

Yum! I totally recommend it! But remember, a good sous-chef is key!

See Kate Conquer: Semlordagen

Where to start?

Okay, a couple things:
1. I love to cook, and I like to think I'm rather good at it. Baking? Not so much. Cooking is like a game; toss in a little of this and a little of that, and it will turn out okay. Baking is like a science: if you deviate from a prescribed amount of the recipe's main characters, you will most likely totally flop. Rock-hard pizza dough, super-dense bread that's supposed to be light and airy... I could go on but it would be embarrassing. And, anytime yeast is involved the stakes get higher because of the large time investment.

2. I love to eat, and I like to think I'm rather good at it. While I would not say I am a huge fan of Swedish cuisine, the area that I have no complaints about is their pastry department. And, how awesome is this: many of their several holiday seasons (particularly Advent and Lent) have specific pastries to add to the celebration. AWESOME.

3. Over time, my husband has made me a big believer in the theory of, "Why pay someone to do something that I can do myself?" (There are limits to this, of course... like, I'm not quite ready to learn how to dry-clean my own clothes.) So, while I love to go to a cafe and enjoy my latte and delectable puff of flour/butter/sugar goodness, there is a certain Consumption Point at which it makes sense for me to cut out the middleman and start doing the baking myself.

The Semla is a most fabulous piece of heaven that haunts Sweden between Christmas and Easter, but remains quite elusive during the other nine or so months of the year. Traditionally it was eaten on Fat Tuesday, because it is so rich and decadent - it's prominent attribute is the almond paste center topped with whipped cream - that it was supposed to help fatten one up before the season of Lenten fasting. In modern times, Swedes eat them for three months and have foregone the fasting. Fair enough.

My Swedish friend Elin is a fabulous baker. She rolls out breads and cakes and scones like it's going out of style (although I assure you, it's not), and quite frankly, intimidates the yeast out of me! [lame attempt to make a baking joke]

She came over a few weeks ago, and, being in the middle of Semla Season, the topic came up. At one point she oh-so-casually commented, "Oh, you should just make them, they're soooooooo easy!" If they're soooooooo easy, I thought, why doesn't she just show me how to do it?

And soooooooo, she did.


We used this recipe, which was great. If YOU use this recipe, it will require the use of both language and measurement translation, which Google can surely help with. Or, here's one I found in English, although it looks slightly more complex.

Here's the result, and they were absolutely as good as they looked.

If you read the wiki article on semlor, than you know that the average Swede tends to eat about five semlor a year. I, on the other hand, ate four on Semlordagen last Tuesday, which, I suppose, makes me your average American.

The Confines of My Creativity

I've been thinking a lot about cooking lately. Not in the, "Hey I should really learn to be a better cook" kind of way but more in a, "Gee my creativity does not include the culinary realm" kind of way. I love words, visual art and design of all kinds but when it comes to cooking this is pretty much all I'm capable of:

A chicken and green bean casserole with green beans, 1 can cream of chicken soup and crushed crackers on top.


More on this topic later I'm sure.