Tag: Experiments

Gourmet brunch, thrifty style

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If you’ve been paying attention, you know that my dinners out this weekend have provided me with two new food items: whole cardamom pods from The Ayurveda Cafe and freshly baked bread from Le Pain Quotidien. This morning, I combined the two to make Cardamom French Toast!

I broke into a cardamom pod, and here’s what I found inside:

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I gathered about a tsp of the seeds (and I still have more pods left!):

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Because I don’t have proper spice grinding tools and I didn’t feel like using a knife to chop the teeny seeds to smithereens, I added them to my French toast batter in the hopes that they would soften as they soaked. In addition to the cardamom, the batter contained 1 egg, 3/4 cup skim milk, 1 tsp vanilla, and 1/2 tsp cinnamon. I sliced last night’s bread so I had four pieces:

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And pressed the bread into the batter bowl so it could soak in the fridge for 30 minutes while I worked on other things:

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Eventually, I heated 1/2 Tbsp canola oil in a nonstick pan and dumped in the entire contents of the bowl. Some of the bread pieces fell apart because they were so saturated with the batter. Can you spot the cardamom?

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Once the French Toast finished cooking, I topped it with cinnamon and a tsp of my roommate Brigitte’s (of the pulled pork fame) maple cream. Have you experienced maple cream before? It tastes exactly like those leaf-shaped maple candies they sell in Vermont … except that it’s creamy (surprise!).

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Here’s my brunch spread with Nutcracker Sweet tea, the last half cup of chopped cantaloupe and strawberries (with nutmeg), and French Toast:

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Mmmmmm:

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Of course, I ended up topping the toast with the fruit:

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I loved the cardamom flavor in this dish. The whole seeds were definitely more flavorful than my ground cardamom, and they added a fun crunch to the meal. Because some of the seeds were still a little too strong, I’ll probably soak them longer or find a way to crush them next time.

Although delicious, I’m not sure how long this meal will hold me over since the bread was definitely not whole grain. I will very likely be eating again sooner rather than later!

Lazy brunch

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All week long, thanks to this and this, I’ve had a pancake craving snowballing out of control. I was ready to take action when I woke up this morning, so I developed a single-serving recipe for Apple-Cinnamon Pancakes with Peanut Sauce.

Hot off the pan:

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All seven pancakes topped with the sauce and flanked by Nutcracker Sweet tea and a bowl of cantaloupe and strawberries:

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I dumped the bowl of fruit on top of the pancakes because I’m a mixer:

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Yum! Despite the laziness, it’s been a productive morning because I have (1) satisfied my pancake craving and (2) completed four loads of laundry. Next up: Bride Wars with the girls!

An oaty mess

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Mmmmmmmmm …

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But first, I literally jumped out of bed this morning when my alarm went off at 5. I felt so refreshed, like it was Saturday morning at 10! Maybe because I went to bed at 8 last night?

I bundled up like yesterday (plus a scarf I wrapped around my face so just my eyes could peek through) and jogged over to the gym to do Tina’s 45-Minute Treadmill Run again (minus the first 5 minutes because I counted the jog there as my warmup) and make up for missing running club last night. I finished with 10 minutes stretching/abs and jogged back home for my oats! Stats: 1 hour, 5 mins (including stretching), 4.61 miles (3.67 on treadmill; 0.94 outside), 567 calories, average heart rate 155, highest heart rate 186.

Remember how I said that pumpkin mess I made last night would have been even better with banana? Inspiration struck this morning when I realized that I only had about 1/3 cup of my banana bread crockpot oats left. I mixed the rest of the oats with the rest of the pumpkin mess and oven-ed it at 350 for 30 minutes while I got ready. With 1/2 cup yogurt, coconut, nutmeg, and peanut butter:

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Pumpkin-banana-bread-mess-oatmeal highlights:

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Of course I accompanied it with a giant mug of sugar cookie sleigh ride tea … which I’ll be drinking all day at work and probably all night tonight and all weekend and every minute for the rest of my life because it is soooo good :-).

P.S. If you love oats, too, you’ll be excited to see what HungryGirl wrote about today!

Need heat!

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When I got back to the office from my visit this afternoon, I knew there was no way the running club was going to happen tonight. Even though the snow had stopped, I was cold and tired and could think of nothing I wanted less than to wait around for 6:30 so I could run outside in the ice-fest. I’ll go to the gym tomorrow morning instead, once I’ve had time to forget how bitter it is out there. The whole subway ride home, I was alternately sleeping and running through potential dinner items in my head. I came up with steamed cabbage (so original, I know) topped with sofrito:

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LOVE cabbage. I also steamed the core whole (best part!) and snacked on it while I was working on this warm pumpkin mess that involved sauteeing cranberries and apples in a teeny bit of water until the cranberries popped:

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While mixing one cup of canned pumpkin (this past fall, I “picked” a 25-pound pumpkin at a pumpkin patch and spent the better part of a week roasting and pureeing it in eight sections … yet it did not hold a candle to Libby’s 100% pure pumpkin) with vanilla and loads of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger. I have a very heavy hand when it comes to those three spices:

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And an egg:

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I mixed everything together and put it in a pan pancake-style on top of a little canola oil:

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My original intention was a pumpkin omelet, but I clearly used way too much pumpkin for the egg to hold it all together. It’s probably physically impossible for me to go easy on the pumpkin. Once it was cooked through, I put half on a plate and saved the other half for tomorrow. Topped with more nutmeg and a bit of yogurt:

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It would have been even more delicious with bananas mixed in, but can you believe I am already out of them??

For dessert, I thawed my last of the homemade chocolates that one of the nurses at my office made before the holiday. Can you guess what’s inside??

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Peanut butter!!!

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Lunch and a tribute to the last muffin

Lunch was definitely the same as it’s been all week (yay for Sunday preparation!):

pork & beans, sofrito rice, yogurt/fruit, muffin, carrots, orange

pork & beans, sofrito rice, yogurt/fruit, muffin, carrots, orange

Do you see that muffin way at the top of the tower?? That is the last kitchen sink muffin from the batch my mom made while I was home. I will miss them. Thanks, Mom! I took two extra pictures of the historic last muffin as a sign of respect:

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And an important reminder: You can still enter the Snacktrition nuts giveaway contest at N Her Shoes until midnight Friday. Free nuts are waiting!

Pork & beans like a lady

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Teatime!

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Afternoon rolled around, my tum started growling, and I had to begin thinking about lunch for today — and for the rest of the week! After running through a quick inventory of yesterday’s purchases and my already-existing stash of leftovers, I gathered a number of things together.

Clockwise from top left: one cup cooked pork (saved and frozen after a work party six weeks ago!), Dominican rice (from the same party!) + cooked pearled barley (from mom) + sofrito sauce (from coworker Inginia), Jack D BBQ sauce (I would have made some myself, but this was sitting so tantalizingly on the fridge door), two-thirds head of cabbage (yesterday’s groceries), three cups cooked Great Northern beans (from a bag of dried beans I got at the farmers’ market last spring), and one cup chopped grape tomatoes (yesterday’s groceries):

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I thinly chopped the cabbage, steamed it, and mixed half of it with the beans, tomatoes, pork, 1/2 cup BBQ sauce, garlic, sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and two Tbsp chicken stock. Then, I simmered everything in a loosely-covered pot so the flavors could mingle:

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I mixed the rice and barley combo with the other half of the steamed cabbage and added s&p and a tsp of minced chipotle chiles in adobo sauce:

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The quantities worked out perfectly: pork & beans made six 3/4 cup servings, and the sofrito grain blend made six 1/2 cup servings.

Today’s lunch with dramatic mood lighting:

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Between the Jack Daniels BBQ sauce and the teacup and saucer, this meal is practically exploding with class, don’t you think?

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And for dessert, a half cup of cantaloupe (I sprinkled on some nutmeg after the picture — soooo happy to have nutmeg again!):

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In true teatime fashion, I didn’t sit down to this lunch until about 3:30 or 4, so dinner will probably be something snackier and dessertier — can’t wait!