tacos!

Camping in Devils Postpile (Mammoth Lakes, CA) was great fun and the food was simple yet fabulous! The weather was cold and cloudy for the most part, but the fishing was decent and the scenery is some of the most beautiful you can find anywhere in the world. There is something incredibly special about cooking while set amongst towering pine trees and a rushing river. Everything just tastes better.You can't beat this view.

Cooking successfully while in nature takes lots of forethought, especially if it's in a secluded location (like DP) and you have to pack in your ingredients AND your equipments. This means that planning is key! With just a little bit of work - and a very good checklist of items to take with you - you can be prepped to make meals simply and deliciously. I suggest making a list of meals that you'll make for each night, then thinking about every ingredient you'll need in making it. It's important to remember to pack simple things like salt, pepper, tongs, etc. or you'll regret it (says the chick who forgot oil a few years back).

So, to help you out, I'll be making a very detailed list of the items needed to pull off each of the next 5 meals. Each meal for my camping trip was planned for about 10 adults, and since it is camping, I'll just write an ingredient list rather than exact measurements. These meals are so simple that you will want to estimate how much you'll need for the number of campers in your party. Also, I'll jot down the equipment that you'll need.

These meals are not meant to be gourmet. It's just good, wholesome food that can be thrown together relatively quickly and with little prep time. And it tastes good.

*Simple Camping Tacos*
ground meat (turkey or beef)
garlic salt
salt
pepper
vegetable oil

cilantro
onions
grated cheddar cheese
jarred salsa
lime

corn tortillas

*Equipment*
cast iron skillet
large non stick pan
tongs

plates
napkins

For the meat: Brown the meat up in a couple tbsps of vegetable oil in a cast iron skillet. Season and set aside.

For the shells: Heat up 1/4 cup of oil in the non stick pant. To fry them, quickly put them in the oil on side A and leave in for just a sec. Quickly turn it over to side B and fold it in 1/2 until lightly browned. Flip it over to the other side of side B and brown on that side. As soon as they're cooked, put them on a paper towel lined plate and salt them! Seriously, this makes them great!
Assemble your tacos with whatever accoutrements you like. I like cilantro, salsa, cheese and a super quick squirt of lime, but feel free to bring anything else you like.

It will fill you up and satisfy you. Until s'mores, that is.

mostly pantry puttanesca

Puttanesca Recipe + Picture of a Kitty= HEAD EXPLODIE! Are you totally creeped out right about now? I promise you, no cats were harmed in the making of this puttanesca. I have gotten fairly lazy with the picture taking and wanted to post this awesome recipe, and blogs require pics, so meet my other cat, Maeby. My friend and teammate (Go Jedi Masters!), Mustafa, let me borrow his lens, and this is part of that experiment. I must get me one of those.

So anyway, I did a quick look over teh interwebs today and found this little doosie on the origins of Puttanesca (via NY Times):

Ostensibly a sauce invented and made by prostitutes, it is said that pasta puttanesca was designed to lure customers with its aroma. Other explanations have more appeal to the minimalist cook: that the prostitutes were too busy to cook much, or that they had no storage for fresh ingredients and cooked entirely from the pantry. My favorite legend has it that it was a favorite not of prostitutes, but of women who wanted to serve a quick meal at home in order to move on to other things.

So yes, no picture this week. But you should still make this recipe. Because whores like to make it. Wait, what does that make me?

Bran and I have been eating really late lately. He gets home after 7 every night :( and if we want to drive by a house that has just come on the market (we're house-hunting!) or do anything else that necessitates light, we have to do it in that window right after he gets home. That doesn't leave much time for cooking. And to be honest, I have a busy schedule of watching reruns of Beverly Hills 90210 to tend to after I get home from work, so dinner sometimes gets pushed aside.

So at about 8:15 last night, the question came up about dinner. Of course we hadn't been to the store in a week and Bran said he was craving pasta with red sauce. So, I started throwing things into a pot. We had 2 cans of this, one can of that, some of these, a few of those, some veggies that were almost past their prime... Voila! It isn't a true version of puttanesca (with the omission of anchovies and the added veg), but it's what it most closely resembled.

*Mostly Pantry Puttanesca*
1 medium brown onion, diced
5 cloves garlic, crushed
5 uncooked Italian sausage links
2 14oz cans diced tomatoes
1 14oz can tomato sauce
2 tsp red pepper flakes
1-2 tsp dried basil
2 heaping tbsp capers
1/4 cup chopped kalamata olives
2 cups mushrooms, sliced
2 cups baby broccoli, chopped into large pieces

Heat your pasta water! I always forget to do that.

Cover the bottom of your pan with a thin layer of olive oil. Put in your onions and sauté until they are transparent. Add in the garlic and sausage. Cook through.

Add in all of your other ingredients. Let simmer with the lid off until your pasta (I like spaghetti here) is cooked or about 15 minutes.

Eat it up. Yum.

parmesan polenta with sausage ragout

Do I make anything *without* sausage these days? I mean really people! I swear I usually don't cook like this, but it's been so cold and wet this last month that I've been craving it. And it's been in the fridge, so that's motivation enough.

This is the easiest meal ever. I originally got it from epicurious, but I changed it a bit and mine tastes better!

*Parmesan Polenta with Sausage Ragout*

4 links spicy sausage
2 bell peppers
1 package mushroom, more for the mushroom lovers
1/2 cup dry red wine
3 c. marinara sauce (homemade or bottled)
2 lbs polenta (I use 2 of those Trader Joe's tubes)
Parmesan cheese

Heat your oven to 450 degrees.

Heat up your sausage in a dutch oven over medium-high heat. Once it's brown, add in your mushrooms and bell peppers (you can add red pepper flakes if you like it spicy, but remember that the sausage is also hot). Cook for 2-3 minutes. Add in your wine and marinara and bring the mixture up to a boil. Let it simmer until it has reduced a bit, about 10 minutes.

In the meantime, cut your polenta into 1/2-3/4 inch slices on the bias. Place them on a cookie sheet and sprinkle them with parmesan chees, approx. 1 tbsp on each piece. Put them in the oven for about 5 minutes. Once they are warmed all the way through, place them in your broiler to melt the cheese and let it turn to a lovely golden brown.

Serve 2 pieces of polenta with a big heap of the ragout. Pair with a bold red wine.

Haven't I mentioned that I'm writing a cookbook? 1001 Ways to do Sausage (badum bum, tsssss!).

miso soup

Miso soup is one of those things that I crave from time to time. The little packets of dried soup with sorry tofu floaters and sad specks of seaweed quench my cravings for a second, but it's just not the same :( Lucky for me, Glendale has a pretty big Korean population, so naturally, has a supermarket to cater to that demographic. I reap the benefits ;) HK has all sorts of interesting Asian foods, most of which I can't even decipher the contents, save the pictures on the packaging.

So I walked in the market with my right hand gal, Audrey (I'm with her often, right?), and we didn't really know what we wanted to make for dinner. We were completely ravenous (I went hypo-gly-psycho in the store and almost passed out, but cute little Korean gummy candies helped me off the ledge). We thought we'd do sushi (more on that later!) since we had started white rice on our way out the door, and what goes better with that than homemade super easy miso soup! Audrey's dad is Japanese, so she has lots of experience with Japanese foods and has a repertoire of recipes that she can replicate by site and taste. Here's one of 'em:

*Miso Soup a la Audrey*
12 cups water
5 heaping tsp hon dashi
1 package tofu cut into bite sized pieces
10 green onions 6 roughly chopped, 4 finely chopped
10 shitake mushrooms, cut in thick slices
1 small daikon, roughly chopped
1/2 cup white miso paste

Bring the water to a boil. Add in the hon dashi. Mix to combine.

Add everything else except the miso paste and finely chopped green onion. Boil that up for a few minutes. Add in your miso and green onion. Turn off the heat and let it sit for a couple minutes until you're ready to serve.

C'mon, that was blindfolded monkey easy, eh?

easy, yummy din din

I love my mom. I really do. We have a somewhat contentious relationship, but it is often times hilarious and we can laugh at ourselves, and do, often. Growing up, my mom was always good about making sure that we were fed, usually fairly healthfully, but the meals themselves were usually simple things that a working mom with 5 kids could whip up in no time.

Since I started cooking back in college, I have cooked many dishes that I never had growing up. An unanticipated side affect of all of this cooking has been that my mom has been more willing to try to cook a wider variety of things at home. If I make her a meal that she really likes, she'll make that meal again. And again. And again. Like, 2 times in a week, 8 times in a month, again. She's a creature of habit and if she finds something she likes, she'll stick with it.

This is one of those meals that my mom makes all.the.time. It's a combination of easy, reasonably cheap, requires little forethought, uses a very few ingredients (of which most are usually already on hand) and is really very tasty.

*Chicken Piccata*

4-6 pounded chicken breasts
2 or 3 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons of capers
1-2 lemons for juice
1/2 cup of white wine
1 cup of chicken broth
1-2 tablespoons of parsley
4 tablespoons of butter

Salt and pepper your pounded chicken breasts. Dredge them in flour and fry them up in a pan with 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil and 2-3 tablespoons of butter until they're brown on the outside, and not quite done in the middle. Take them out of the pan and set them aside.

In the hot oil, add the crushed garlic and let it sautee for a minute. Then, add your white wine and lemon juice and let it cook down for a just a sec. Add in the capers, chicken broth, 1/2 of the parsley. Let it cook together for a few minutes. Put in the 1/2 stick of butter.

Add back in your chicken and any juices that have accumulated. Cook the chicken through. Sprinkle with the rest of the parsley. Serve with thin spaghetti, garlic bread, and a veg.