Food, Fresh, & More

I'm really incredibly tempted to just turn this into a food blog. Not that it'd be revolutionary or anything wonderful. Maybe a food diary is more accurate - recording recipes that we tried or what we're eating in the different seasons. What specifically brought this up was that while I blog about a lot of interesting stuff for my work blog, there are times when I make things or think things that are just not technically appropriate for my work blog.

Without more rambling, here are some things we have tried or discovered in the last week or so:

1. Panang Curry Paste - we found a packet at Asian Market a while back and just got around to cooking up a curry last night. Yum! While we were buying coconut milk at Thai Binh yesterday, we happened to wander around (it's just the way that store is...it sucks you in!), and discovered that they have large TUBS of red, green, yellow, panang, and masaman curry pastes for a very reasonable price. 1000 g (2 lbs) of curry paste for $3-4!! We love curry, but the jars of paste are always so expensive that we rarely buy it and then hoard it. So exciting to have a cheap source! 
2. Epic Rice Fail. Last week we bought some short grain sushi rice for risotto, since we thought we didn't have any more arborio rice. Then we found the canister of arborio rice. This week we bought a 5 lb. bag of long grain brown rice, because we thought we were out of long grain rice. (We usually use medium grain brown rice, unless we're short on time.) We got home only to find that we had a canister of long grain white rice hiding behind the other rice canister. Epic Fail. 
3. Whole Grain Pancakes. I had this recipe stashed away from my Bon Appetit Daily Calendar from 2008, and we finally got around to trying it. Since I've increasingly been on a whole grain kick, I thought this would be interesting. The recipe calls for whole wheat flour, corn meal, quick oats, and a little bit of AP flour. Oh yeah, and buttermilk. I think that was Steven's favorite part - the buttermilk. No sugar, except a little molasses. They were definitely tasty! They were more interesting and less sweet that regular pancakes. I liked the hint of cornmeal. The texture was really good too. Definitely a keeper in once-in-awhile breakfast food category. 
4. Broccoli Raab - yeah, tried this from the garden at work. Need to work on my harvesting technique for this one! 
5. Lemon Balm Pesto - made a pesto from lemon balm, parmesan cheese, and almonds this afternoon to use on chicken for dinner. Doesn't seem too exciting so far. 
6. Cheese Making Adventures - we made awesome mozzarella cheese from some raw Jersey milk two weeks ago, so we were trying to find cheaper milk to use to make cheese. We thought that we could use Hiland Dairy milk - it wasn't pasteurized at too high a temperature. Unfortunately - not so much. Goodbye cheese dreams!