Avocado Chapati

Back in arugula season (late spring/early summer) 2013, I made some chapati:

CHAPATI

2 c. whole wheat flour (or 1 c. whole wheat, 1 c. white)

2 Tbsp. oil or melted unsalted butter

1 tsp. salt

2/3-3/4 c. warm water

Stir together the flour(s), oil, and salt.  Add enough water to make the dough soft, but not sticky.  Knead for about five minutes, adding more flour or water if necessary.  Let dough rest for five minutes.  Divide dough into ten balls; let those rest another five minutes.

Heat a skillet over medium-high heat until very hot.  Meanwhile, roll out each ball until it is thin like a tortilla.  Grease skillet.  Fry each chapati about 30 seconds on each side, or until little dark brown spots appear.  Use immediately, or reheat leftovers gently in skillet.

For breakfast one morning, we reheated the chapati, mashed an avocado on top, and added arugula, soft boiled eggs, and fresh black pepper.

Okay, so these eggs are more like medium-hard.

Later on in the summer, when we still had arugula but also had cherry tomatoes, we made these again and added smashed tomatoes and extra pepper.

These will definitely be happening again next year.

A Few Good Salads

When you are no longer able to take pictures of your cute niece and nephew because your phone is already full of photos, you know it's time for a blog post.  I dug deep into the recesses of my phone's memory and found a few salads.

 

 

 

Salad #1: Boring Salad with Eggs and Asparagus

 

 

Mixed greens with sliced onion and sections of clementine, tossed in my usual go-to dressing: fig balsamic, olive or canola oil, salt, and pepper.  On the side is green and white asparagus with crispy garlic.  Also soft boiled eggs and whole wheat toast. 

 

This was a good manager special day at Meijer.  The asparagus, the greens, AND the clementines.  Probably other things as well, but I don't remember.

 

 

As usual, we mash the egg and some of the greens onto the toast.  Zach was particularly impressed with these eggs.

 

 

 

Salad #2: Fried Cheese Salad

 

Once upon a time, I found some goat cheese on manager's special, and remembering a salad I had had many years before, I fried it and put it on a salad.  Zach loved it.  Since then, whenever I find a good deal on goat cheese, I pick some up and make a salad or two.  For this particular salad, I had also found some fresh mozzarella on M.S. and had some Cheddar on hand, so I decided to fry those up as well.

Since there are more components to this salad than just cheese, here are some other ingredients:

Red and Green Leaf Lettuce

Roma Tomatoes
Frozen Sweet Corn (thawed)

Grapes

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Avocado
Toasted English Muffin with Butter

 

 

To make fried goat cheese:
cut well-chilled cheese into rounds about 1/2-3/4" thick.  Dip into flour seasoned with salt and pepper (taste a bit of the flour to make sure it tastes lightly salted), then into beaten egg mixed with a little milk.  Finally, dip them into bread crumbs, then either fry right away or, for best results, put them untouching on a plate and chill them for 15-30 minutes.  To fry, cover the bottom of a skillet with about half an inch of oil, heat to medium-high and fry until toasted on each side, flipping after about two minutes.



Salad #3: Steak and Asparagus Salad

 



 I don't actually remember this salad.  It happened around the same time as the first asparagus salad, because I have only had white asparagus once.  I don't remember why I got steak.

Greens, arugula, onion, fig balsamic vinaigrette, sautéed asparagus and zucchini, steak, avocado, whole wheat toast.

 

 

 

Salad #4:  Asparagus, Avocado, Summer Squash, and Mushroom Salad with Egg

 

 

 Yet another salad during the White Asparagus Days.  The White Asparagus Days coincided with the opening of  Lucky's Market in Clintonville.  There was a good sale on red and green leaf lettuces there, along with avocados and many other things.  It's the kind of market where you can't actually afford anything unless it's part of a fantastic sale, but at least some of the sales are indeed fantastic.  The steak in salad #3 may have been from a good Lucky's sale.

 

This salad was made from the said leaf lettuces with raw onion and red wine vinegar.  On top of the greens were sautéed summer squash, white asparagus, and mushrooms, along with diced avocado, a fried egg, and whole wheat toast.  The oil from sautéing the vegetables made up the oil part of the vinaigrette when everything was mixed together.

 

 

Salad #5: Amazing Salad

 

(Not pictured)

 

Had I known I was going to do a post on salads, I would have taken pictures of some of the AMAZING salads I had for lunch recently.  Once again, steak was involved, leftover from the Russian dinner.  Most of the salads were exactly the same, and basically great, thanks to really good manager's specials.

 

 

Amazing Salad Recipe (serves 1)

2 oz. steak

1 Lime

Kosher Salt

1 oz. Whole Wheat Linguini

2 c. Mixed Greens

1 c. Arugula

5 Mushrooms, sliced

1 Radish, sliced

Onion, 4-5 thin slices

8 Sugar Snap Peas

1/4 Green Bell Pepper, sliced

1/2 Avocado, diced

 

 

Cut the lime in half and squeeze the juice from one half onto both sides of the steak.  Sprinkle it lightly with kosher salt on both sides, set aside.  Cook pasta.  Meanwhile, assemble the salad ingredients.  Once pasta is done, drain it and add it to the salad.  Cook the steak on both sides to desired doneness.  Let rest for 5 minutes, then slice.  Squeeze remaining lime half over salad, sprinkle with about 1/4 tsp kosher salt (or to taste), mix well, top with lime.

 

I had this salad once, and thought it was fantastic, but that it had to be a fluke.  So I tried it again the next day, and the next, and the next, and the next, and IT WAS STILL GOOD!

 

(I ran out of steak after day 2 and started using ground turkey, and I started running out of other ingredients and doing lots of supplementing, and eventually the salads weren't as good anymore)

 

 



Sibling Christmas

Faths and former Faths gathered at the Yoders' the day after Christmas for our annual sibling gathering.  Instead of our usual frantsuskiy salad and pogaca menu, we had fancy meats and cheeses inspired by the Mulladys visit to the Moerlein Lager House. 

 

Gherkins, both sweet and dill.  Crackers. Candied bacon. Pomegranates.  Homemade apple kraut.  Beer bread (in basket).  Assorted charcuterie.  Assorted cheeses.  Baked brie.  Assorted mustards.  Pickled beets (barely in picture).  Peppers and carrots.

Upper left was a fontina; upper right was something with a balsamic rind;
lower left was a bleu cheese; lower right was a vintage gouda.

Romano Black Pepper Salami.  Pinot Noir Salami (was sadly fairly flavorless).
Calabrese Salami, that gradually got spicier and spicier.

Maple-/Cider-/Chipotle-Glazed Bacon

Cute Nephew, looking oddly lumpy.


We ate, we drank cider, the non-Fath boys played Settlers of Catan, we refilled the bowl of dill gherkins numerous times because a certain niece kept eating them, we Skyped with Mom and Dad while opening presents, we appeased children, etc., etc., etc.

Soft-Boiled Eggs and Crock Pot Bread for Breakfast

This was a springtime breakfast with Zach.  It dirties up a lot of dishes to have a Turkish-style breakfast, but it is definitely our favorite.  Part of why we like them is because they are very relaxed, since we can only do Turkish breakfast when we both have the morning off.

We had cucumbers from our garden, tomatoes from the store, soft-boiled eggs, what appears to be hummus (maybe?), apple butter and strawberry jam, and some green-tomato pickles that seem to have plenty of turmeric in them.  And, of course, Turkish tea.  Zach was also making some "espresso" in our aeropress.

These eggs turned out pretty well.  The bread we ate was baked in a crock pot, something I'd wanted to try for a while.  The results were underwhelming.  I used this method http://busymomsmenuplan.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-to-make-homemade-bread-in-crock-pot.html and whole wheat dough.  

I remember looking at many different recipes to decide what to do, so I may have used a combination of methods.  The idea is pretty simple: put dough in crock pot, cover, bake.  It took quite a bit longer than the recipe said, and it was NEVER going to get a nice crisp crust like the pictures led me to believe.  It still didn't look browned AT ALL at 3 hours, but I took it out anyway.  The result was a heavy (whole wheat) bread that was fine, but nothing exciting.  I will probably try again.

Anyway, I'm sure it was a lovely breakfast, and that we drank way too much Turkish tea, and I probably had a slight headache later from all the sugar.

Steak Dinner

People are always asking me cooking questions: how much to make, how long to cook it, etc.  This is all well and good until they ask me about cooking meat. I may know a little more than the average person about cooking meat, but that is mostly because of a cooking-methods class I took (so many years ago by now!).  I almost never cook plain meat, like, for example, a steak.

As far as I can remember, I have eaten five beef steaks in my life.  There may have been one or two more, but I'm not positive.  The first was at a Girl Scout camp thing when I was maybe 10 or 11.  The second was when I was dating Evan, and we had surf and turf at a restaurant for a business Christmas party.  The third was a steak dinner I made for Evan when he visited me (that steak was way overcooked!).  The fourth was when Zach and I had a free meal/night at a hotel for a Christmas present from brother and sister-in-law.  And this brings us to the fifth and most recent.

We went to Zach's grandparents' "farm" (aka "cabin" (house) and tons of land), and they were getting ready to grill some steaks when it was time for us to leave.  They sent two frozen steaks along with us, and a few days later, we had our fancy dinner.

Medium-rare (let's be honest, they turned out to be medium) steak with mushrooms and onions, baked sweet potato with cinnamon butter, and roasted asparagus.  And a frond of dill for decoration.

Zach's brother has been learning the art of vinification and had given us two bottles of "amber red" recently.

Jeremiah wine!

One must (obviously) follow a steak dinner with dessert.  We had cheesecake and decaf coffee.

Served on our fancy Turkish tea set

 The cheesecake was far from homemade, alas.  Zach wanted cheesecake on our vacation, and the only spring-form pan I have is huge.  We realized it would be cheaper (and less caloric) to buy a small one instead of make a huge one.  We put homemade rhubarb preserves on top, so I guess it's slightly homemade.  And you can't ignore those amazing homemade chocolate swirls on the plate.  Nothing says fancy like chocolate swirls!

So, there's the story of our steak dinner.  I'm going to try to mix some new meals in with the old ones, so that I'm not always looking at ancient, blurry photos, trying to guess what we were eating back in the day (there are a lot of meals that involve whole wheat pasta and spinach salads.  A lot.).

Not Much to Say About This One

 Whole wheat linguini with yellow peppers, mushrooms, zucchini, and greens.  Tomato salad with onions, cucumbers, and balsamic.

Choose Your Own Adventure

This picture makes me crave iced tea.  It may also make me crave the other things in this picture, if only I could figure out what they are.

Whole wheat penne with:

a) chicken thigh with Cajun spices

b) chicken breast with Cajun spices

c) pork chop with Cajun spices

d) chicken thigh with generic Susannah spices (probably paprika, garlic, black pepper, salt, thyme)

e) chicken breast with generic Susannah spices

f) pork chop with generic Susannah spices

g) none of the above

I'm going to go with d or g.

Spinach salad with:

a) onions, gorgonzola, and dill

b) onions, feta, and dill

c) onions, weird pieces of apples or something, and dill

d) none of the above.

Probably a, perhaps in a lemon dressing.  I'm not sure why the dill is there; it throws me off a little and makes me wonder what I might have put with the chicken/pork/other.

All I know for sure, is that I probably should have added a soft-boiled egg somewhere.