I ripped this recipe off from a dish in the Whole Foods cold salad buffet, which goes for like $6 a pound. When I discovered it, I fell in love with it - the textures and colors are amazing. My only problem (have you yet to realize that I have a problem with everything?) was that, like all of their prepared foods, it was too greazy. Still, I was always excited when they had a fresh tray of it and bummed when they didn’t have any out. Then one day I found the ingredients they used for it in their produce section. I’m not gonna lie to you, this is health food and it’s not gonna fill you up. You’ll probably need half a sandwich or some fruit to round out your lunch. Or serve as a fancy appetizer salad.

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I never give a damn when it a National month of anything, because either it’s lame or I’m too self-centered to care. But I figured I’d share a grilled cheese recipe with you anyway. It’s the British equivalent of ours, what they call “cheese on toast” and it’s basically cheese on toast. And it’s delicious.

Cooking time: Five minutes

Step one: Take bread (the puffy sandwich air kind, like Wonder) out of sack and toast it in toaster oven or regular oven.

Step two: While the bread is toasting, finely slice some cheddar cheese*. Very finely slice some onions (if you aren’t too lazy, I suggest rinsing the sliced onions under cold water).

Step three: Put cheese and onions and a few splashes of worcestershire sauce on toast. Toast again (or broil) until cheese is melted.

Step four: Eat.

Step five: Repeat.

Cost: Free if you make this at someone else’s house with their food. It makes for awesome drunk food as long as you are sober enough to mind the toaster or oven.

*They don’t have American cheese over there but I guess you can use deli American. For the love of god, please don’t use Kraft singles because that would make me cry. I used some Australian cheddar in the photo above (I shot that, for reals) - $2.50 for 1/2 lb at Whole Foods.

Cedar’s Pita Chips (plain flavored): Oh, boy! Are these things shitty! Imagine the thinnest chip physically possible. And then take away it’s flavor. And then try dragging that chip through a thick hummus. Did I mention that all the “chips” are broken up in the bag? These things are useless. Actually, maybe you can add milk and make a cereal out of it.

ChewFood grade: D-

Stacy’s Pita Chips (”Simply Naked” flavored): Awesome. The right amount of salt. Giant whole squares of crispy goodness. And they are uber thick - almost as thick as a book of matches. I also recommend the “Texarkana Hot” flavor - those things are spicy (the real kind of spicy, not the lame “spicy” that most brands make for white people’s sensitive taste buds).

ChewFood grade: A

Kettle Brand Pita Chips (”Salt Kissed” flavored): Apparently to the Kettle Brand people, “kissed” means “made out with tongues”. They were so salty that after a handful of chips, my tongue was swollen and numb. I thought that was especially weird for Kettle, whose potato chips are the best (Chedder Beer being my favorite). I wrote to them and told them this and they sent me two coupons for free bags of Kettle Brand Chips.

ChewFood grade: C+

Healthier hummus

Makes about a cup and a half of hummus - enough to last me for or a week or two. I pretty much just eyeball everything for this recipe now. It’s pretty hard to eff up hummus. I pan fry the garlic because it’s faster than roasting.

• One 15 oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
• Juice from half a lemon
• One teaspoon of Hungarian paprika (you can substitute regular paprika with a dash of cayenne)
• Small handful of flat leaf parsley
• Two tablespoons (less or more depending on your taste) of tahini - if you don’t want to shell out the bones for tahini, Alton Brown uses peanut butter
• Six cloves of garlic
• Three or four tablespoons olive oil

Pan fry garlic in olive oil over medium heat until soft and brown (about five minutes). Set aside to cool. Once cool, throw everything in the food processor (including the garlic infused olive oil) and whiz. If too thick, add more olive oil and/or water to desired consistency. Season with salt and pepper or more fresh lemon juice. Serve with crudité or pita chips. Use instead of mayo on sandwiches and tuna salads.

Health: This is pretty good for you even though it’s high in (good) fat. Eat in moderation.

Cost: Cheap. $1.10 for about ten to twelve servings.

Cost breakdown:
chickpeas $.75
lemon $.25
paprika $.10 ($3 a tin)
parsley $.25 ($1.99 a bunch)
tahini $.50 ($5 a jar)
garlic $.25

I made our first meal at our new apartment the other night. I can’t explain the zeal I got from cooking in a new place with a gas stove. Plus, I finally used my new Global paring knife which cuts through things like butter. Delicious, delicious butter.

I picked up some cheese from a shop called Stinky on Smith Street for a roasted beet and goat cheese salad. The frommagier recommended a goat cheese from upstate New York called Lively Run. I got the rose peppercorn flavored one. (You can see the specks in the photo above.) It was fantastic. Some of the best goat cheese I’ve ever had. It tasted fresh and green. And only $3.50 for a log!

The greens I used are watercress, which is totally different than the watercress I am used to eating: Long Island supermarket watercress has smaller, darker leaves and a thicker stalks - which makes it amazing in soups, but awkward in salads. I dressed the salad with fresh lemon juice and olive oil using my new Misto olive oil spritzer (basically a reusable Pam bottle, sans the chemicals).

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So I made some “Chewy Noodle Soup” over the weekend - the end result was delicious as promised by Ms. Chewy herself (rest easy homegirl, you avoided a lawsuit for false advertising) and I ate and shared a fuckload of it. My only complaint is that it ended up giving me less broth than I would have liked, which left me with a crapload of leftover hand-shredded chicken (Doesn’t the additon of “hand-shredded” make it seem classier? They do that crap often in restaurants to justify the retarded prices - just overly describe stuff so people think “wow, classy” and pay you like $70 for a bowl of soup) and a dilemma - what to do with said leftover chicken?

Now, keep in mind it is a Tuesday - I just got back from work, I’m tired as hell and feeling lazy (and high) - and I don’t want to put too much work into my meal but, I want satisfaction for my tastebuds and my belly. So, after a quick survey of what I gots to work with, I decided to go for a “classy” chicken salad.

Most chicken salads are fucking disasters (particularly the ones you get in any grocery/deli - you might as well shit on some bread and eat that, as it’s probably more delicious and definitely more nutritious), they have a ton of mayo, dry chicken, no spice and often lack anything yummy in ‘em that will give them a tiny bit of crunch (which in my book is fucking essential for good chicken salad, I don’t want to feel like I’m eating a paste of chicken - I want some damn texture, bitches!!!).

The chicken salad I’m about to school you on will rock the mouths of the people (maybe not clear off their faces but, it may require some facial adjustment - perhaps only a few inches) and will erase the filthy memories of prior chicken salads that have violated your mouth. Continue reading…

I have yet to mention my enormous, unrelenting, unfaltering love for seafood. Combine that my new found obsession with French food and you get bouillabaisse - a dish I have eaten three times in last three weeks. Unfortunately, I feel self-conscious about taking photos of it with my crappy point and shoot camera with a flash in the kind of places that serve it. So here’s a photo I “borrowed” from the internet. It’s the best one I could find and it still doesn’t do it justice.

If you are unfamiliar, bouillabaisse is an uber-delicious cornucopia of various fish and shellfish and veg in a seasoned tomato based broth and served with rouille on toasted baguette slices. It’s the French version of the Italian based cioppino (which I’ve made at home a couple of times, despite the high cost). I think the broth in the bouillabaisse is more complex than the cioppino, but I’ve never had cioppino in a restaurant. The important thing is that I can cram as many different kinds of seafoods as possible into my gullet with just one dish.

You must understand that, for me, this is the food equivalent of Jenna Jameson or Pam Anderson or whoever the boys touch themselves to these days.

Matt and I went to Bouillabaisse 126 in Caroll Gardens yesterday for the last night of Dine In Brooklyn (B126 being the only participating restaurant in “Columbia Waterfront“). The restaurant is right next door to Schnäck and it’s backyard can be seen from our new backyard. C’est merveilleux! (That’s French for “fuckin’ awesome”.)

I’m on a mission to try the bouillabaisse at every restaurant in Brooklyn that serves it. Any other suggestions about good French eats in Carroll Gardens would be much appreciated, because there seems to be a wonderfully surprising amount of them.

Seafood, I love you.

I was eating my yogurt concoction a few nights ago. Matt laughed at me.

“What?”, I said.
“You’re nodding your head.”
“You’ve never seen me do that before? I do it when I am eating something delicious.”
“Yeah, but it’s yogurt and fruit. That combination is a no brainer.”
“But it’s yogurt and fruit the way I like it. Not like those pre-arranged jobs in the plastic pots.”

I spent a lot of time picking out healthy yogurts the other week at the market. Before I became obsessed with reading food labels, I assumed all yogurt was healthy. That’s the way they market it: “It helps you fit into that bikini” and they show some girl all frumpy and she starts to eat Yoplait and then she puts on a ugly bikini and gets gawked at by brohams at Muscle Beach. Or the one with the interracial lesbian couple who are always lounging around, so happy and full of life because of yogurt. Or maybe they are stoned. Feed your kids Go-Gurt and it makes them ride skateboards with lots of safety gear and call you a “cool mom” so you get to be all smug while you clean the kitchen and prep your husband’s dinner because, god damn it, it better be ready by the time he gets home or so help me, God…

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So, I’m not a great cook by any means. I can make a decent meal that might get me a little closer to a girl’s bed than, say, a trip to the Olive Garden, but I don’t really have such great chops in the kitchen. And when I’m cooking for myself, laziness and apathy set in and I don’t really put too much effort into making things taste or look that great. That said, there have been times when, faced with a lack of money and/or the fact that all stores and food vendors are closed, I have been left to eat a mish mash of the most disgustingly incongruous flavors known to man. “Meals” that pushed the limits of even my indifference. A prime example of this is something I made for myself in early post-college years.

I lived in a small studio apartment in Astoria. It was 11pm and I was broke and starving. I looked in my fridge. It was slim pickins. Obviously, the only thing to do was to create this bizarre and disgusting dish with the few edibles I had:

Poor editor pseudo burrito

1 large egg
1 slice American cheese
2 hot dogs
1 small onion
1 (stale) flour tortilla

Heat oven to 350.
Thinly slice the onion and sautee in olive oil until opaque. Set aside.
Lightly fry the egg in a non-stick pan. When it is cooked sufficiently (you want the yolk to still be runny), place it in the center of the tortilla. Place the hot dogs on top and sprinkle the onions over it. Top this with the slice of cheese. Wrap the tortilla up and toss it in the oven for like 10 minutes or so.

I ate this with various condiments. My least favorite combination was russian dressing, although mayonnaise and Dijon mustard gave it a run for its money. Ketchup was the least disgusting.

Drink pairing: aerated tap water.

The moral of the story is as follows: Don’t be a poor editor.

I am now a poor graduate student and I understand that having a freezer full of Tower Isles beef patties is preferable to such unpleasant experimentation.

I love cooking fish steaks and fillets because generally, they are very easy and fast. I mean super fast. Faster than it takes the delivery guy. I use my toaster oven to finish the fish. Don’t hate on the toaster oven and pigeon hole it as a carb-only device. It’s a miniature oven that heats up faster and uses less energy. There’s no reason for me to use an entire regular oven when I’m cooking just one serving of fish.

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You can get your days worth of vegetables just from this one dish. For me, this is one of those recipes that I make when I haven’t been to the market in over a week and pull together things that are just sitting in my fridge. Spaghetti squashes will keep on your counter for about three weeks. If you have never eaten spaghetti squash or have never cooked one yourself before, pick one up the next time you do your grocery shopping and use this simple recipe. It’s like totally healthful and yumm-o in thirty minutes, you guys!

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