Whole Wheat Pumpkin-Cranberry Muffins

Do you still have a can of pumpkin lurking in your pantry left over from Thanksgiving?  That’s really the great thing about canned food, isn’t it?  Well, I’ve got a great way for you to use it…pumpkin muffins with a healthier twist.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
pinch of ground cloves
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup canned pumpkin
1/2 cup buttermilk (or make your own from regular or Cholov Yisroel milk)
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 tablespoons melted butter or margarine
1 large egg
2/3 cup sweetened dried cranberries, chopped
1/4 cup chopped nuts (optional, hazelnuts pictured)

Preheat oven to 375°.Combine flour, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and cloves well with a whisk in a medium bowl. Combine granulated sugar and remaining wet ingredients (through egg) in a large bowl; beat with a mixer until relatively smooth.  Add dry mixture to wet ingredients; beat at low speed just until combined.  Gently fold in dried cranberries. Place 12 paper muffin cup liners in muffin pan (you can spray cups and pan with cooking spray if you like).  Spoon batter into cups and top with chopped nuts if desired.  Bake at 375° for 25 minutes or until muffins spring back when touched lightly in center.  Remove muffins from pan immediately and let cool on a wire rack.  Muffins will be dense but moist and make a great breakfast or snack.  (Note: You may fill cups more to make 9 larger muffins [what is pictured here].)

Slow-Cooker Middle Eastern Black Beans and Rice

This recipe is so easy and is best done in a slow-cooker so it’s twice as convenient.  Just dump everything in, leave it for about an hour, and you have a wonderful, hearty, and vegetarian dinner!

Ingredients:

2 cans of black beans (low-sodium, rinsed)

2 cans of chickpeas (rinsed)

1 can of medium black olives

1 cup white rice (or brown)

3-4 roma tomatoes, chopped

3 cups vegetable stock (low-sodium)

6 cloves of garlic, minced

1 small onion, chopped finely

2 tbsp paprika

1.5 tbsp cumin

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp coriander

2 tsp kosher salt

2 tbsp kosher olive oil

Cook the rice according to package instructions (typically, boil 1 cup rice in 2 cups vegetable broth for about 20 minutes) and set aside.  In a medium sauce pan, heat olive oil over medium high heat.  Add onions and cook until just translucent.  Add garlic and paprika (heating paprika in oil brings out its flavour).  Cook just until garlic softens and then toss in tomatoes and remaining spices.  Lower heat and cook for 2-3 minutes or until tomatoes soften.  Empty pan into slow-cooker set on high.  Add remaining 1 cup of vegetable broth, rice, beans, chickpeas, and olives.  Mix well.  Reduce slow-cooker heat to low after about a half an hour.  Mixture is ready to eat when hot, but tastes better after about an hour or two in the slow-cooker on low.  I serve it with whole-grain pita and it easily feeds 4 very hungry adults.

 

Happy (Secular) New Year!

So school started, then there were the High Holy Days, then my birthday, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah…and yeah, yeah, you get the idea.  I have lots of excuses for why I haven’t posted in a very long time.  Most of them have to do with the fact that I was much busier with a one-year-old and two college courses to teach than I thought I’d be.  It’s been a lot of fun, but things are quieting down a bit now in the beginning of 2013.  Which brings me to the purpose of this particular post: my issue with New Year’s resolutions.

It’s not that I have a problem with the idea of resolutions so much as what they become for most people – meaningless statements forgotten before or quickly following the end of January.  Instead, I personally think that New Year’s goals are more effective.  Rather than “resolving” (a very serious term which can leave you feeling defeated and guilty should you fail) to do something in the new year, one should set somewhat general, short-term goals for the new year.  Having goals rather than resolutions means that any great efforts towards these goals, whether they are achieved or not, can still be recognized as some accomplishment.  It also means that you can be much less specific and evaluate the progress of your goals at the end of the year in a more useful way.  For example, instead of resolving to lose 30 pounds in 2013 and then feeling like a failure next January when you’ve only lost 10 or 15 pounds, set a goal of exercising more than you currently do and eating more healthfully.  Then, when you’ve lost 10 pounds next January, you can say that you realistically worked towards your goal and in the process lost a few extra pounds.  Of course, this is just an example based on one of the most common of all New Year’s resolutions, but it could be applied in lots of ways.

In order stay accountable, sharing these goals with someone (even if it’s just one person) is a good idea.  Here are a few of my goals to keep me accountable:

1) Get outside more.  As a family, we’re going to try to participate in some local weekly nature hikes.  I’m hoping this will help me reconnect with nature, reduce stress, and get a bit more fit.

2) Read to my son more.  We already have weekly trips to the library and I read to him often, but now that he’s understanding more (but sitting still less!), I’d like to try reading to him every day or even more than once per day.

3) Give more tzedakah.  I’d like to give more of my money and time to help worthy causes.  I’ve become rather cynical in the past few years, and I want to remind myself and demonstrate to my son that other people, animals, and the environment are worth our investment.  I want to be proud if he does what I say and what I do.

Those are just a few of my goals.  That last one’s kind of lofty, but like I said, they’re goals.  It’s something to work towards and something I’ll likely set as a goal every year.

Here’s one more goal: Post here more often.  I’ve got a few recipes I’ve discovered waiting in the wings, and I have some general parenting/life experiences to share that I’d love to post about in the coming days and weeks.  So, let this be the first of many new posts towards one of my 2013 goals!

The Eat-In Kitchen

This is slightly off topic for me, but I started a rant on Facebook and felt I should finish it here.

I loathe the idea of an eat-in kitchen – positively abhor it.  My feeling is that a kitchen is for cooking and a dining room is for dining.  I don’t want to entertain in my kitchen; I want to hurry up and finish cooking so I can spend time with my guests in the dining or living room.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand that some houses don’t have room for a dining room.  In that case, an eat-in kitchen is entirely acceptable.  What I have a real problem with is the house with both a dining room and an eat-in kitchen.  Unless you only use the eating area of the kitchen as say, a breakfast nook, I feel that having any other than the most intimate family meals there constitutes a great invasion of privacy.  Perhaps this is more telling of my feelings about the act of cooking than it is my feelings towards interior design, but it’s something that bothers me and with the way most houses are designed today, something nearly impossible to avoid.

Part of the reason I hate the idea of an “entertaining kitchen” so much is that I don’t like people watching me cook.  I could never be a t.v. chef (well, maybe) because I hate people asking if they can help or asking what I’m doing or adding or….you get the idea.  I’m like a finicky painter when I cook.  Observers hinder my creative process.  Also, I don’t want people who I’m supposed to be feeding and entertaining as guests feeling like they’re obligated to ask me if I need help with anything.  This new idea of putting guests to work is beyond my comprehension.

So why not just get everything done ahead of time and not worry about my kitchen being open to everything (and everyone) else?  Well, then what’s the purpose of an “entertaining” kitchen?  Also, where am I supposed to hide my dirty dishes?  Unless, you expect me to clean all of those as well before the guests arrive.

I am heavily invested emotionally, mentally, and sometimes physically in the food I make and that makes it very personal for me.  That also means that I can be very sensitive about questions asked while I’m cooking or the help that’s offered.  Sure, I might be uptight – but it’s my kitchen.

I also feel like as a mother, the kitchen is one of the few rooms that is really mine all to myself.  My husband is allowed in obviously, but he mainly grabs something to drink or a snack and leaves; otherwise, the kitchen is all mine.  And I think that’s the final reason why I loathe the eat-in kitchen.  I don’t want guests in my “secret garden.”

 

Baby Birthdays

As I am still hopelessly caught up in the rush and busy-ness that is the start of the school year, I am also procrastinating planning my son’s first birthday party.  In a previous post, I had said that turning one didn’t really change much.  While I stand by the fact that it isn’t some magical day when everything suddenly changes, there is a certainty to it that’s hard to ignore.  My son is going to be one year old.  Soon, his age will no longer be counted in months.

So, I’ve been putting off planning his party.  One year birthday parties are mostly for the adults anyway.  It gives grandparents, aunts, and cousins the opportunity to dote on J, and it also gives us all an excuse to get together and bond.  For these reasons, I should be slightly more invested in the process but for some reason, I just can’t connect to it.  To make things even more challenging, J’s birthday is on a Saturday which works great for all of our families (most of whom don’t even know what Shabbat is) but now I need to get any work I’m doing for the party done the day before.  Fortunately, my parents have offered to host the party at their house and to help with the preparations.

I suppose I need to just commit myself to getting everything organized.  His birthday is eleven days away, and I haven’t even invited everyone yet!

Flourless Tiger’s Eye Cookies

Want to feel like you’ve got the eye of the tiger?  Try these super-easy, super-delicious cookies.

What you need:

Slightly less than 1 cup of creamy peanut butter

1 1/2 tbsp Nutella or other hazelnut spread

1 cup light brown sugar

1 egg

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  Cream together the brown sugar and egg in a mixing bowl.  Once smooth, mix in the peanut butter until thoroughly combined.  Finally, drizzle the hazelnut spread over the top of the batter (you can warm it slightly first if you want to drizzle, but you will need to let it cool again before the next step).  Next, stir in the spread just slightly, being sure to maintain some of the “swirl.”  Form dough into 1″ balls and use a fork to press down the cookies in a hatch pattern on a non-greased baking sheet.  Bake for 10 minutes or until slightly puffy, and then let them finish on the pan on the counter for a few minutes.

These are chewy and delicious and oh-so-easy!

Fresh from the oven!

How to make friends and not scare people…

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I am not the most social person on the planet.  Have I made any new friends since our move?  No.  Have I tried?  Well, no.

I am the type of person who loves to complain about not having friends but refuses to go up and introduce myself to anyone.  It is probably my biggest flaw, and I am not proud of it.  Talking about it with my husband, I thought back and realized that every friend I remember making in the past ten years has been the result of them seeking me out (thank you!).  To be honest, I’m not really sure why this is.  I am shy, but I have no problem speaking to large groups of people, teaching (obviously), or engaging in business discussions.  There is just something about the intimate, personal exchange necessary to make a friend that I can’t quite handle.  Maybe I’m just lazy.  Maybe it’s a fear of intimacy and laziness.  Yes, that’s probably it.

In any case, I have decided that if I’m going to make it in this big new city, I am going to have to make some friends and the older I get, the less I can rely on someone to come sit by me at lunch and make me their friend (oh, how I long for those days!).  But how does one make friends?  At least ten years of waiting for someone else to make the first move has left me a little rusty.

I recently discovered that a seemingly very nice family lives next to us in our apartment building.  It would be great to have another friend with a family.  I asked my husband if it would be weird to take them a pie or something and introduce myself.  I mean, do people still do that?  My husband assured me it wasn’t weird, but here I am, one week later and I still haven’t walked the three feet to their door to introduce myself.  (Note: I asked my dad for a second opinion, and he said the pie was unnecessary, but I think having strange people knock on your door is always smoothed by the giving of baked goods.)  My other option is to hang out at the library.  J and I used to go to baby story time in our old city, but I never made any other friends that way.  The other moms were way too clique-ish and it was a bit like middle school again trying to break my way in.  I did notice at our library here today though that there were several moms just “hanging out” with their kids in the juvenile fiction section.  Maybe if loitering at a bar is a good way to pick up singles, then loitering in the juvenile fiction section of the library is a good way to pick up literate mom friends.  Maybe?

I realize that I am probably making this all way more complicated than it needs to be, but I feel like making adult friends is such a difficult endeavor and it rarely attracts much discussion or setting-of-rules.

Perhaps next week I’ll bake that pie and spend that afternoon leisurely playing with J at the library…until then, this is the Dysfunctional Friend signing off.

It’s the most busy time of the year…

I was talking to my husband the other night and complaining about how I haven’t had time to blog in awhile.  He said, “Well, you are always doing like twelve things at once.”  True.  I’ve been especially busy lately with school about to begin.  As an educator, I’ve had to take a break from my adventures in blog-land to prepare for another year of teaching.  Please forgive me.

The beginning of the school year also means that it’s football season (well, preseason right now, but soon, oh yes, soon).  My husband and I bonded over our love of professional football when we first met, and it was nice after all of the craziness of the past few weeks to sit down together and watch a game.  Unfortunately, the first game we got to catch together was the Colts versus the Steelers – our respective teams.  We kept things friendly (it is still only preseason), but I didn’t withhold any cheers or boos as I watched my beloved Colts rally to a level of performance fans haven’t seen in over a year.  He never withholds his cheers or boos either.

Maybe that’s the beauty of football.  We can sit together and chat over commercial breaks, and then when the game is on, we can let loose.  We are free to yell, whoop, holler, and otherwise act up.  I’m sure someone out there is criticizing us for being barbaric, etc., etc., etc., but sometimes you just have to let loose.  And isn’t it even better if you can do it with the person you love?

Well, I promise to post some more soon as I get into the swing of things.  I have a peanut butter cookie recipe to post, some comments on the High Holidays, and thoughts on my son’s first birthday to post.  Stay tuned!

Happy Birthday, Julia!

Today would have been Julia Child’s 100th birthday.  There have been many things posted online in commemoration of this very special lady, but I think this brief video from the BBC is one of the better ones.

BBC News – Julia Childs recipe for life.

Learning to cook…take some time to find your talent

I am not a great cook.  I am a pretty good cook.  I have never been to cooking school or even spent a weekend at some expensive cooking retreat.  I’ve never even taken one of those turbo-charged classes at a certain high-end kitchen store.  My mom taught me how to make exactly five things: guacamole, chicken enchiladas, chile rellenos, meatloaf, and chicken kiev.  So how did I figure out how to cook well enough to cook my way into my husband’s heart?  The hard way.

I’m going to get on a soapbox for a moment and say that it really annoys me when people say they don’t know how to cook.  My sister says this all the time, and to be fair, she’s the kind of person who burns toast and manages to find a way to screw up scrambled eggs.  She doesn’t know how to cook because she doesn’t want to know though.  I think people who don’t know how to cook generally fall into one of about three categories: those who don’t want to learn, those who don’t have time to learn, and those who don’t need to learn.  Obviously, I don’t find any of those excuses particularly convincing.  Even if you don’t need to know how to cook (spouse cooks, private chef, etc.) or either of the other excuses, you should know how to make at least one or two things for those times when you’re in a real pinch.  Feeding yourself is a basic need after all, and I am pretty lenient about what I consider ‘knowing how to cook.’

And that’s how I learned how to cook.  I needed to learn how to cook.  When I moved out of my parents’ house at three months shy of eighteen to go to college, I never moved back.  Sure, macaroni and cheese from a box is great for a little while, but I think I was born a foodie.  I wasn’t satisfied with mediocre food from a box.  If I wanted to eat well, I was going to have to do it myself.  Unfortunately, that meant eating not-so-well until I figured it out.

Yes, I learned how to cook almost entirely through trial and error.  Well, almost.  The secret to learning something through trial and error without having a decade long learning curve is to seek out some outside resources.  With cooking, we are lucky to have a variety of resources available to us.  There are recipe websites, cookbooks, blogs (like mine), YouTube videos, and entire cable channels devoted to teaching you how to cook.  From these resources, you can learn techniques (t.v. is great for learning knife work) and maybe even more importantly, you can begin to learn what flavours work together.  You can then use these techniques and your knowledge of flavour profiles to begin to create your own dishes based on your preferences (say, creating kosher adaptations).  This is exactly how I learned how to cook.

I’ve made some pretty nasty stuff.  I made a grape-stuffed chicken that made me gag and I’ve made some of the most flavorless soups and stews that have ever had the sad opportunity to boil.  But, I kept at it.  Now, my failures are much fewer and far between (though things still don’t always work out…especially when you start talking about baking).  Come to think of it, cooking is probably the only thing I wasn’t good at right away that I didn’t quit (that’s another blog post).

I guess my whole point is that it’s not that hard.  Just try every once in awhile.  Watch 5 minutes of a cooking show here and there or read a recipe online.  Give it a chance and see what happens.  You might discover a talent you never knew you had, and it will only increase your sources of delicious food.  In the words of the lovely Ina Garten, “How bad could that be?”