Pictures of drinks beside their sugar equivalents in food. Some you expect but most are quite shocking.
Reblogged from Soup.
May 20, 2010 | 2,328 notes | Comments
Reblogged from Soup.
Oatmeal Raisin Cookies (& I Know I Haven’t Posted in Forever)
I’ve been busy. Mostly doing things like moving to a new city and starting a new job. Moving also means that I’ve been working my way through Kansas City restaurants and not cooking as much at home, even though I now have access to Whole Foods and an incredible farmer’s market. When I have cooked at home, I’ve made tacos - steak tacos with caramelized onions, cilantro, lime and guacamole. Lots and lots of yummy tacos.
But last night, I made good use of the gorgeous KitchenAid mixer that’s been sitting on the counter as decoration for the past month and whipped up some oatmeal raisin cookies, a recipe I modified from epicurious.com, making them a bit healthier. Well, healthy for cookies, I guess.
Here we go:
1 3/4 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 tsp molasses
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Stir together oats, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
Beat together butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add egg, molasses and vanilla and beat until combined well. Add oat mixture and beat until just combined.
Drop dough by heaping tablespoons 2 inches apart onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper and flatten mounds slightly with moistened fingers.
Bake for 10 minutes and transfer to wire racks to cool.
Enjoy!
After sitting in a sports bar for four days straight (and watching my bracket go down the toilet), my friends and I worked our way through a nice series of bar food: fried pickles, nachos, waffle fries, chicken strips, fried green beans, chips and salsa… The one thing we skipped? Buffalo wings.
And oh man do I love wings.
So last night, Aaron and I decided to make our own. I thought it would be complicated and involve a lot of frying, which I try to avoid as much as possible at home, but this recipe called for broiling the wings instead and was reeeaaaally easy.
I modified the sauce a bit, using 3/4 cup of Frank’s hot sauce and 1/2 stick unsalted butter (um, I didn’t say these were healthy wings) because I like my wings “wet” or extra saucy. I also skipped the cayenne pepper, but kept the paprika.
Served with celery and blue cheese dipping sauce, the wings were perfect, satisfying and had just the right amount of kick.
Yum.
Marinating shrimp
The finished product
The hint of warmth in the air put me in spring/summer mode, when I like nothing more than noshing on seafood and Mexican food. There’s just something about warm weather that screams margaritas and guacamole and fish tacos. So last night, I got my fix a little early in the season with shrimp tacos.
I mixed up a quick marinade of olive oil, lime juice, salt, cayenne pepper, cumin, cilantro, and two cloves of garlic. I made salsa and guacamole and sauteed the shrimp for a few minutes (they cook reeeaaaallly quickly). We assembled our tacos with warmed up corn tortillas, a bit of guac, cilantro, salsa and red cabbage and dug in. While I think I’d prefer the shrimp grilled next time, they made for a relatively easy weeknight meal and were totally satisfying. If you want to mix it up, the shrimp could easily be substituted for flank steak or chicken or mahi mahi fillets.
Adding this one to the rotation of go-to weeknight dinners.
» Exciting news of the day: Wichita has a CSA program
That’s Community Supported Agriculture, friends. And it’s a good thing.
“I recently picked up a load of these chickens from a [factory farm] refuge and brought them home to join my free-range hens, so they can enjoy the rest of their lives. They were actually the first ones I’d ever seen and I was very shocked by the state they were in. The combs on top of their heads were pale pink, almost white, and flat. They should be red and sticking up. Their feet were in really bad shape, because they didn’t have a proper flat surface to stand on - imagine being forced to stand on wire bars for over a year. Instead of being short from scratching about, their claws were long. Their feathers were really dry and in an awful state and their beaks were clipped. In fact, the hens themselves looked almost comatose for the first day or so that I had them at home. This is not respecting an animal while it’s alive. This is not giving them a good and natural life. There’s absolutely no excuse for treating animals in this way. They may be forced to lay more eggs, to make more profit, but the final product is also affected and eggs are simply not as good as free-range or organic. A stressed animal, pumped full of antibiotics, gives a second rate product.”
—
Jamie Oliver, Jamie at Home
This certainly makes the extra dollar or two spent on farm fresh eggs from a local farm or organic eggs from the supermarket seem well worth it.
(This cookbook is excellent, btw.)
I just spent $48 on seeds.
Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute.
SEEDS. $48.
I know what you’re thinking: She’s gone mad.
Cooking is obviously a huge passion of mine. And part of cooking is understanding food and where it comes from. So growing my own vegetables and herbs seems entirely logical if I want to really learn more about what goes on my plate.
I don’t have a green thumb. I kill houseplants. I don’t particularly like dirt or bugs.
That’s all about to change.
I’m going to make gardening my bitch.
Wish me luck.
And in case you were wondering, it’s really not that difficult to spend a lot on seeds. Those $2 packets start to really add up. I purchased mine through the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, known for it’s selection of organic and heirloom seeds. Even better? They don’t sell genetically engineered seeds or plants. As they state in their catalog (yes, there are catalogs full of seeds): “We wish to support agricultural practice that encourages healthier soils, genetically diverse agricultural ecosystems and, ultimately, people and communities.”
I can get behind a company like that. $48 well spent.
Lunch yesterday at Dolci & Joes with my lovely friend Jana.
I wanted to like Dolci & Joes. I really did. Jesus quotes posted all over the walls aside, I’d heard positive things about the food.
The reality? It was just… meh.
“I’m a nightmare to dine with,” was my disclaimer in an email to Carly when I filled her in on lunch because, well, it’s true. I have to dissect what is right and wrong about everything. I’m like the awful guy Samantha tried to makeover and then date on Sex & the City - the Turtle. The guy who spent five minutes trying to figure out what kind of mushrooms he was eating. “Are these porcinis?”
Instead of complaining about why the tomato basil soup was way more like cream flavored with tomato and why the avocado on my sandwich should have been green instead of brown mush, I’ll just say this: it’s better than Subway.
Do with that what you will.
My dining companion, however, was fabulous.
Say hello to stone crabs, which seem to be unique to Florida. They were my entree last night at Johnnie’s Hideaway in Orlando. It was up there with the best meals of my life. Really.
We ate:
Calamari
Stone crabs (2 1/2 lbs. - oof)
Prawns as big as my head
Sweet potato fries
Key lime pie
Guava cheesecake
We drank:
Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon (excellent)
We followed it up with berry tarts. They’re incredibly easy and delicious.
I made Simply Recipes’ pastry dough (halved), rolled it out into two discs, filled each one with thawed berries from the freezer aisle at the grocery store that I tossed with some sugar, brushed the pastry dough with an egg wash and baked at 350 for 35 minutes.
Easy as pie. Or tart.
