Mexican Tomato Rice and Beans

Also from the new cookbook, I made this one night when my partner was at his weekly Toastmasters meeting. I personally found this recipe to feel somewhat incomplete until I added cheese to my bowl. I added mozzerella because I had very few choices in the house, but it worked (more or less).

Ingredients

1 cup uncooked medium-grain white rice       (I used Jasmine, actually)
1 14 1/2 oz can diced tomatoes (preferably "petite-cut")
2 Tbs extra-virgin olive oil
6 medium cloves garlic, finely chopped         (I threw mine in a mini food processor for this)
1 medium fresh jalapeno, cored and finely chopped (or, if you like spicy food, leave in the ribs and seeds)           (I threw this in the food processor with the garlic for ease of prep)
1 15 oz can black beans, rinsed and drained
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp chili powder
Kosher or fine sea salt
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh oregano leaves and tender stems
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro leaves and tender stems

Directions

In a 1-quart saucepan, combine rice and 2 cups cold water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, cover, reduce heat to low, and cook 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand covered another 5 minutes.

Meanwhile...

Set a fine-mesh sieve in a bowl and drain the can of tomatoes. Pour the tomato juice in a 1-cup liquid measuring cup and add enough water to the juice to equal 1 cup.

Heat a skillet over medium-high heat, pour in oil and stir fry garlic and jalapeno until garlic is brown and jalapeno is pungent. Add the black beans, cumni, chili powder, 2 tsp salt. Stir two or three times to incorporate the mixture and cook the spices (30 seconds). Stir in tomato juice and water mixture and bring to boil. Adjust heat to maintain gentle boil and cook until beans absorb much of the liquid (5-7 minutes).

Add tomatoes, oregano, cilantro, and cooked rice until everything is warm (1-2 minutes). Serve immediately.


I highly suggest the fresh cilantro. If you can find the oregano fresh, use it. Otherwise, I think dry probably will work. I'd say add it halfway through the bean cooking so it has a chance to absorb a bit of liquid.

Risotto with Peas, Mint, & Lemon

From the new cookbook, we tried this. I've only made boxed risotto, so this was a fun adventure. It was quite a bit more labor-intensive, which was a bit taxing that particular night. Overall, though, it was fine. I need to point out that it made a ton of food. We didn't finish it all before we had to chuck it for being too old.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture. I don't know how that happened. I could have sworn I had a picture. Oops. I'm so sorry. I did find this picture from the Fine Cooking website, though.

Ingredients

5-6 cups vegetable broth    (I used some leftover chicken broth mixed with vegetable broth)
4 Tbs unsalted butter
1 medium onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice
Kosher salt
2 cups arborio rice (or other risotto rice)
1/2 cup dry white wine (like Pinot Grigio)
2 cups frozen peas
1/2 cup chopped fresh mint
2 Tbs fresh lemon juice
1 Tbs finely grated lemon zest
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano; more for serving

Directions

Heat the broth in a saucepan until very hot, then reduce heat to just keep the broth hot.

In another pan, melt 2 Tbs butter over medium heat. Add onions, generous pinch of salt, and saute until onion softens and started to turn lightly golden. Add the rice and stir until the grains are well coated with butter and edges become translucent. Pour in the wine and stir until it's absorbed.

Add another generous pinch of salt and ladle enough hot broth into the pan to barely cover the rice (about 1 cup). Bring to a boil, then adjust the heat to maintain a lively simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the broth has been mostly absorbed.

Continue adding broth in 1/2 cup increments, stirring and simmering until it has been absorbed each time.

After 16-18 minutes, the rice should be creamy but still fairly firm. Add peas and another 1/2 cup broth. Continue simmering and stirring until the peas are just cooked and rice is just tender. Stir in another splash of broth if it's too thick.

Remove from heat, stir in mint, lemon juice, lemon zest, remaining 2 Tbs butter, and parmigiano. Sprinkle with salt to taste. Serve immediately with sprinkling of extra parmigiano.



Next time I made this, I'll be cutting the recipe in half, I think. Or I'll serve more people.

Braised Sausage with Balsamic-Glazed Onions and Grapes

My sister gave me Fine Cooking Cook Fresh: 150 Recipes for Cooking and Eating Fresh Year-Round for Christmas. It's a really exciting recipe book filled with recipes I'm terrified to try but that look fairly doable. I went through the book and marked a bunch of recipes I wanted to try, then I made my partner look at those recipes and identify a few to try one week.

The first recipe we tried was braised sausage with balsamic-glazed onions and grapes. It sounds super fancy, tastes fancy, but was fairly simple to make. Here's the only picture I took of it (I didn't think to do so earlier in the process) plus the summary.

Salad, baguette, and sausage dinner

I'd like to give a couple little disclaimers:

• I really don't like vinegar that much. I like pickles, but vinegar itself is gross (remnant from my first job mixing giant vats of coleslaw at KFC). That said, this is good and doesn't taste like vinegar at all.
• We didn't use fancy anything. The sausage was the prepackaged store brand sausage from the meat department. I wager fancier stuff would taste even better.

Ingredients

3 Tbs olive oil
8 links (about 2 lb.) sweet Italian sausage, pricked with a fork
1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced (about 2 cups)
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup lower-salt chicken broth
2 Tbs balsamic vinegar
20 seedless red grapes, halved
2 Tbs chopped fresh oregano

Directions

Heat 1 Tbs olive oil over medium heat, add the sausages and cook, turning every few minutes until they're brown all over. Remove to a large plate.

Add remaining olive oil, onions, and salt and cook until the onion softens and turns light brown. Add the chicken broth and balsamic vinegar and scrape the bottom of the skillet to incorporate browned bits. Reduce to a gentle simmer.

Add sausages and grapes, cover skillet with the lid ajar, and cook until the sausages are cooked, about 25 minutes. Stir occasionally. Serve sprinkled with oregano.



I'd say the fresh oregano is worth it, but we had a ridiculously hard time finding it in stores right after the holidays. You can probably sub dried, which I'll do if I can't find fresh easily. It's actually suggested you serve with baguette and a salad, which is how we ended up with the above salad. If you need to stay gluten-free, don't do the baguette or substitute something gluten-free. The whole thing took maybe 45 minutes including prep (which includes slicing the onion and grapes). We ate leftovers for a week. When you eat the leftovers, just watch that initially some coagulated fat will be on the top. Just scrape it off and reheat.

The book has some commentary I didn't copy out. It's written so that someone like my partner, who can cook a bit but not much, can follow the directions. It describes how the oil should look before you add the sausage and what temperatures to use at which stage. It also tells you to cut into the sausage at the end to figure out if it's cooked. Seriously, this book is awesome. I recommend finding it.

Once upon a kitchen...

Cooking is easily one of my favorite hobbies. Perhaps because it's so important to me or perhaps because it feels like everyone talks about loving cooking, I've been reluctant to talk about it more. That's just silly. I have to remember to give myself permission to be myself, no matter what everyone else does.

A short history of me cooking:

Two of my earliest memories of cooking are from around ages 4-6. 

In the first memory, my mom wasn't feeling great -- either sick or tired, probably pregnant with my younger sister -- and I was set the task of making ramen from a package. I'm sure you know what I mean when I talk about those $0.10 packages of ramen you can get. She used to have me help make ramen with her, so it wasn't totally strange that she asked me to make some. Sadly, when I read 2 cups of water, I grabbed a drinking cup (probably 12 oz or more) and used 2 of those instead of a measuring cup. The ramen was pretty horrible, and while I felt embarrassed at the time, I now just laugh.

In my second memory, my mom went outside to work in the front garden. I wanted to make cinnamon-sugar toast (something I was totally allowed to do). Being so small and enjoying the first piece so much, I decided to make more. And more. And more. Let's just say I probably made half a loaf of cinnamon-sugar toast, all the while not understanding that I'd be full long before I finished what was in front of me. I just thought it was so tasty. I remember realizing at some point that I had far too much toast in front of me and regularly glancing out the door to make sure my mom didn't come in and see how much I'd made. I can't remember if I actually ate it all before she came back in or if I threw some away or if maybe she came in and helped me eat the last couple pieces. Apparently I didn't think she'd notice half a loaf of bread gone in a couple hours.

Needless to say, as I grew, I helped my mom more and more in the kitchen.

As a teen, I made more dinners for my family. My mom loves baking. While she definitely can cook, she doesn't enjoy it as much as she enjoys baking. So I helped out and made dinners, especially on nights when I had youth group and we needed to eat by a specific time. In high school, I took two cooking classes. It was thanks to the cooking labs in those classes that I started to really enjoy reading recipes to decide if I wanted to try making the food.

I guess that all leads up to where I am now. I've been experimenting more as the years go on. I don't claim to be exceptionally great at cooking, but I think when you enjoy something and practice it regularly, you get better. So I'm not fantastic, but I'm fairly decent and adventurous. 

My sisters are a bit experimental and good, but they're more like my mom: they love baking more than cooking, though they're capable of both. Overall, though, they're impressed with what I tell them I've made. To be fair, they only hear what I've made, not tasted it.

Something I really want to share is my cooking experimentation. I've had successes and failures. It's kind of stupid what I fail at when I succeed with other things. Before I share what I've done, I wanted to share some of my favorite cooking youtube channels.

SORTED Food: This is easily my favorite cooking channel. The guys are from England (which makes conversions for me really challenging), so they have a different outlook on food. I love it because they share things more common to them and less common to me (like Indian-inspired cooking). Some recipes are intimidating, but most are fairly approachable. Plus, they've inspired an entire community on their website sortedfood.com where people share recipes and just talk about food.

Raw. Vegan. Not Gross.: I'm an omnivore, but I don't know huge amounts about eating vegetarian or vegan. I know it's super healthy, so I try to incorporate more of that kind of cuisine. Laura Miller shares these amazing raw vegan recipes. She discusses the health benefits of whatever main ingredient she's talking about so you understand it's not just "fad" stuff. Even if I've never eaten sauerkraut, her discussion of it and its health benefits makes me want to make it. I've made fewer of her recipes solely because it uses more expensive ingredients (like the sheer amount of nuts she uses!), but I absolutely love watching and learning more. I plan on trying more of her recipes this year. As a note, this show is on Tastemade, a channel of a bunch of cooking shows. I haven't watched many of the other shows because I don't find them as easily approachable as Raw. Vegan. Not Gross.

My Drunk Kitchen: Hannah Hart is around my age, which makes this approachable from the outset. She drinks (usually wine) and cooks in the kitchen. By the end of the episode, she's fairly tipsy. This is fantastic particularly because it means half of her food doesn't come out well. Something goes wrong (usually a lack of measuring ingredients or improper ingredients), but she's totally positive anyway. Half her food comes out great, it needs to be pointed out. She has guests on all the time. Sometimes it's other famous youtubers, sometimes it's actual celebrities like Mary Louise Parker, Lance Bass, Jamie Oliver, or Sarah Silverman. Hannah also does a great job of talking about issues of the day using food as a metaphor.

You Deserve a Drink: Mamrie Hart (friend but not relation of Hannah Hart) makes drinks. She's been a bartender. She attends mixology classes. She creates drinks. And she's vegan, so all her recipes are vegan. It's actually really neat. I've made pretty much none of her drinks, but I love watching what she does. I find it fascinating. Plus she makes more puns than you'd think a person could per episode. She also has special guests on sometimes, but usually they're youtubers (though she did recently do a drink for Jamie Oliver). Even if you're like me and not much of a drinker, you'd probably enjoy one or two of these.

Cooking Fast and Fresh with West: This can barely count as a cooking show. Misha Collins (who plays Castiel on Supernatural) has posted 4 videos where he lets his son, West, pick all the ingredients for a recipe and tell him exactly how to make the food. Then Misha eats the dinner. West is three or four, so the recipes are weird. It's more an example of amazing fathering than cooking, but the episodes are hilarious. I'd recommend watching them if you're ever feeling blue.

I watch other things, but mostly it's one-off recipes, not channels. These are far more inspiration than actual sources of recipes for me. 

I'd love suggestions of other channels to watch!

Transform

A couple years ago, I learned about a music group called Steam Powered Giraffe. They are both musicians and actors. Each band member has a steampunk robot persona.

From left to right: The Spine, Hatchworth, and Rabbit

I haven't been to a live show, but all their videos on youtube depict how amazingly the inhabit these robot forms. They move and talk only like robots during their shows and for publicity. If you're familiar at all with groups like GWAR or Lordi, this band has a similar attitude.

Today, the musician who plays Rabbit posted a beautiful video that depicts Rabbit's transformation through the years, focusing heavily on the gender change Rabbit underwent in 2014. I find the video so touching that I have to share it.

The actress, Isabella Bennett, is transgender and currently in her first year of hormone therapy. She is the twin sibling of The Spine, David Bennett.

I am moved by the way she documents her transgender experience with all the ups and downs included. If you're interested in her journey, I encourage you to watch her monthly videos.

Take Care of Yourself

Considering all my gifts for Yule and Christmas, the theme for 2015 is probably "take care of yourself". From friends and family I received the magic bullet I've talked about, cough drops, rubber duckies and bubble bath, luxurious scented bath salts, and an entire at-home spa kit. I'd just like to take a bit to talk about the spa kit because it was so incredible.

It contained:
Foot bath, marbles, scented epsom salt, oil vaporizer-diffuser, oils for  diffuser, gel facial mask, fuzzy socks, shower head, head massager, and an exfoliating shower pouf.

I've only used everything once so far, but I've used several of the pieces multiple times. I've been sick lately. I should probably have tried the spa kit to help me feel better but I felt too sick to even think that far.

I've loved using the oil diffuser. It lights up in changing colors, so it's pretty. It automatically shuts off when it gets too low, so I don't have to babysit it. And it makes the house smell great, which can't be wrong.

The shower head makes every shower fun. I really can't express how much fun it is. It changes color by temperature. Basically it's green when the water is cold, blue when warm, and red when hot. Since it's the middle of winter, I've been showering almost exclusively in red, but I'm sure I'll shower in blue when it's spring and during the summer I know I'll take my cool-off-before-bed showers in green.


Taking care of myself is something I struggle with. I'm not saying I'm bad to myself, but I forget that I'm allowed to pamper myself. I was recently talking with a friend about how hard it is to feel like cooking something really nice for yourself when you're single (or your partner is gone on a trip, like mine was recently).

It's hard to remember that I'm allowed to just stop and play around with soap and moisturizer and nail polish. I actually can put on makeup for no reason other than I feel like it. If I want to take myself out for a nice meal all alone, I can. I shouldn't worry what people at the restaurant think about me. I can take long baths just for myself.

Have you ever heard of HALT? It's hungry, angry, lonely, tired. If you feel any of those, stop and take care of yourself. It's hard to remember sometimes.

One day I felt bad and was beating myself up. My mom said, "Be nice to my daughter." It really hit me that I'm not "just me," I'm someone special to people. I'm my parents' daughter and my sisters' sister and my friends' friend and my partner's partner. That seems like something people should remember, but it's easy to forget. I don't want my friends to beat themselves up. I want them to take care of themselves. They feel the same for me. Sometimes I can't take care of myself for me but I can do it for them.

I can speculate why this is the case. It ranges from I'm a natural caretaker of others to I'm a woman and society has historically given us very little permission to do things for ourselves. It's strange to realize that at some point I was conditioned that I'm not worth it because I'm me, I'm only worth it because I'm something to someone else.

When I was younger, I was really proud of myself for taking like 5 minutes in the morning to get ready. Do makeup or special style my hair? Why? I'm not vain or shallow like so many girls in my middle and high schools. My looks don't matter. People need to like me for who I am, not what I look like. This, of course, had direct connections to the fact that I've been overweight (and ruthlessly teased) for a good chunk of my life.

Now that I'm past the years of middle and high school (and sorority life), I've finally come to realize several things.
One is that the person who was meanest to me and teased me most was me. Sure people said stuff sometimes, but I said it to myself far more than anyone else.
Two is that it's okay to spend time doing your hair or makeup or whatever you want, and it doesn't automatically mean you're vain. It means that you want to take any pride whatsoever in your appearance. You do it because you want to do it, not because society demands it or because someone else needs you to do it.
Three is that there's a good chance any negative comments made to me when I was younger was based on my personality. I'm a decent person, okay? But I was a know-it-all. I was a bit like Hermione from Harry Potter. People didn't hate her (you know, after that first Halloween), but before the troll situation in book 1, Ron and Harry thought she was pretty snobby or know-it-all. Well, that was me. It took me longer than her to stop being that way, but it eventually happened. In the meantime, I had socialization to learn. And I was always nice, but I've known a lot of people who are nice and smart and not know-it-all.

If I could talk to my younger self, I'd try to encourage me to relax, don't stress, stop trying to impress everyone, just be a bit more open. I judged people as much as they judged me.

I'd also tell myself that even though there were hard and really horrible things ahead, we all make it to the other side. And those things are what will really make me a better person, so stop worrying about that particular group of girls in high school.


Now that the hard, horrible stuff has mostly passed, it's time to learn to take care of myself. How did everyone else learn how to do it? It's not easy or intuitive.

Two tips

As I wrote about my health and beauty products experiments, I decided to share a couple tips I've found particularly helpful to me.

The most important thing to tell you is:

Ask the experts
What most people don't know is that librarians really love to help answer questions. We don't think most questions are stupid, and we don't tell you even if we think it's stupid. We want you to have the right information. We've been trained on identifying sources. We have advanced search techniques. Chances are, the librarian you're talking to is sitting there because they like the challenge of finding information.
Likewise, ask sales associates or other employees if you can't find what you want in a store. I had to ask to find green clay. I should have asked to save myself time finding glycerin. Recently I had to ask a co-op employee to help me when I wanted to taste a goji berry to check if I had an allergy (I do). By asking the employee the last time, I was just given two little berries to try and I didn't waste money or product with something I wouldn't, couldn't, or shouldn't eat.
The best lesson I learned at library school was that it's totally okay to say "I don't know". Follow it up with "let me find that answer" or "let me ask a colleague" or "let me look around and get back to you". The liberation I now have knowing "I don't know" is a completely appropriate and acceptable answer is something I can't even explain. I wish I could tell teenage me.


The other tip I can share is use Google drive or cloud storage. This is especially good if you have a smart device. I have an ipod touch and an Android phone. My phone is designed to work with Google, but I know iphones aren't. Still, here's my tip.

Create quick reference documents or spreadsheets on Google drive. When I went to get ingredients from the co-op, I ended up in a weird headspace due to my car not working. I had all the recipes I wanted to try in a document online so I didn't forget something (like guar gum).

I love this option because I can access all my drive documents on a computer or my phone. I type up shopping lists in drive on my computer, then read the list on my phone when I'm at the store. Using drive also allows me to change those lists from work, home, or the store. If I want to use it on my ipod, I just make sure I pull the document up before I leave an internet connection so it's there when I'm not online.


I know neither of these are ground-breaking pieces of information. It's just a reminder of what you probably know. There is no reason to make your life harder than it has to be.