So it's been a while...

Sorry, life continues while the blog stands still. I've been more active on other platforms (Twitter, Facebook) and also joined Instagram and Snapchat.

I got an Instant Pot for Christmas in 2018 and finally started using it just after Christmas in 2019. It's been a lot of fun and has really inspired me to do more home-cooking in the past couple months.

Favorite recipes so far:
Instant Pot Creamy Shells and Beef from Six Sisters' Stuff

Instant Pot Yogurt from Six Sisters' Stuff (this is a cold-start recipe)

Instant Pot Mushroom Risotto from Pressure Luck

Instant Pot Key Lime Cheesecake from Twin City Adventures

I've also tried applesauce, chicken noodle soup, and mac-and-cheese, but none of those were good enough to get memorialized here...

Red Curry Recipe

Borrowed heavily from a now-deleted post by SheSimmers.com

1 can coconut cream (19 oz)
1/2 can red curry paste
2-3 Tablespoons avocado oil
1.25 pounds ground pork
1 pound grilled chicken (CostCo skewers, don't ask...)
1/2 large zucchini, cut into small slivers
1/2 large orange bell pepper, cut into small slivers
1/2 pound white mushrooms, already cooked (leftover from Omelet Day)
a couple of garlic scapes, cut into tiny pieces
1/4 teaspoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
handful of fresh basil leaves (I used lettuce basil from my mom's herb garden)

Heat the avocado oil in the bottom of a large Dutch oven.
Add the cream from the can of coconut - but save at least 1/2 cup for the end
Once the cream starts to break down, add the curry paste and mix gently to combine.
After the curry paste has heated through and started smelling good, add the ground pork. Don't stir too often, as you want the bottom to actually brown if possible.
Once the pork is cooked, add vegetables, chicken, and 1/2 cup water, plus more coconut milk if you've got more than 1/2 cup left.
Cook about 15-20 minutes, until vegetables are soft but not mushy and chicken is heated through. Add the last 1/2 cup of coconut milk, the fish sauce, sugar, salt, and basil. 
Mix thoroughly and taste; adjust seasonings as necessary.
Serve over rice.

OK if you really want to ask: the grilled chicken skewers make a good addition to a salad but we weren't eating them fast enough...

16th day of Summer Vacation: in which we do Desperation Cooking

It's been a nutty few days around here. Several of my favorite people are moving away and I've been running around trying to have a last conversation with each of them before they depart. I'm pretty sure that I'll see all of them again, possibly even in the near future, but my brain doesn't accept that as a fact and I'm getting rather verklempt, just thinking about going to work and not having them there every day.

I also seem to be coming down with something: I'm sniffling, exhausted, and my entire body aches.

So, when it came time to get dinner on the table tonight, I was not feeling my finest. I found a big container of fried rice. I also found a small container of sausage-and-diced-mozzerella that had been intended to go into stuffed mushrooms, but I ran out of mushrooms long before I ran out of filling for them. So yes, I threw the two containers together in a serving bowl, microwaved it for 2 minutes, and put it out. And it was delicious.

We also had carrot sticks and some left-over tossed salad to round out our meal.

10th day of summer vacation, in which we try new recipes

I've cooked some really delicious things in the recent past, so without further ado here's a round-up of some recent recipe triumphs.

Summer Squash Couscous with Sultanas, Pistachios, and Mint from Food 52: this is insanely delicious and naturally vegetarian. It can be made vegan if you swap in agave nectar for the honey, and gluten-free if you swap in quinoa for the couscous. We liked it better after letting it sit for a few hours: the mint fragrance spreads throughout the salad.

Olive Oil Blondies with Chocolate Frosting by Molly Yeh: I don't bother frosting them, and I put in more chocolate chips. They're yummy and the prep time is under 5 minutes.

Melissa Clark's Excellent White Bread from The Wednesday Chef: very good white bread

Tempered Lentils from Serendib Kitchen: this was really, really tasty and made excellent leftovers. My friend Roshani says that they aren't fully authentic, as they come out too soupy, but I still love this dish.

Cauliflower Poriyal from Serendib Kitchen: takes a long time to cook, but almost no effort while it's cooking, and the result is incredibly delicious

Coffee Break Muffins from Dorie Greenspan: really good coffee flavor, but they don't keep well

Basic Muffins from King Arthur Flour: easy to make, easy to riff upon

Baked Oatmeal with Caramelized Pears and Vanilla Cream from Smitten Kitchen Every Day (which I checked out from the library): it's a bit fussy, but totally delicious and reheats well.

Sunken Cherry Lemon Cake, with dog

I'm participating in the Food52 Baking Project. This month, the featured cookbook is Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan and my copy still hasn't arrived, so I'm limited to what's available online. Thus far, I've only made the Custardy Apple Squares and they were delicious!

Last month's cookbook was Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss. I've been a fan of her blog for years, so this is actually what convinced me to join the project. For yesterday's Throw Back Thursday, I made a Sunken Cherry Lemon Cake. It needed more lemon, and I lost track of time and slightly over-baked it. However, the whole excuse for this post is that I took a picture of it, and it came out surprisingly well. Here it is:

Please note the small hopeful dog in the bottom left corner. Sorry about the funky shadows...

The plate is by Calamityware; we have almost a whole set.

Recipe Round Up

I'm only going to list the good ones here... no sense wasting space on some mediocre recipes and poorly executed baked goods.

Vegan Black Bean Soup from Smitten Kitchen: cheap, easy, delicious, and healthy. Will definitely make again.

Dry Fried String Beans No Wok from Serious Eats: easy and delicious (even though I couldn't find the Sichuan peppercorns). Will definitely make again.

Spiced Oat and Pear Blondies from Bon Appetit: a little crumbly, but easy and delicious. A remarkable number of my students wanted the recipe.

Szechuan Eggplant Stirfryhttp://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/szechwan-eggplant-stir-fry-recipe.html from Food Network: first time I made it just as described and it was lovely. Second time I omitted the cornstarch and added some mushrooms and peppers - even better! Leftovers are also great cold or hot.

Wartime Sourdough Chocolate Cake from King Arthur Flour: very easy, yummy, and a great way to use up spare sourdough starter (you weigh the starter, then subtract half of that from the flour and half of that from the water in the recipe.) The cream-and-chocolate icing was rather gloppy and never fully solidified, but my kids viewed that as a feature rather than a bug.

So out of the twelve new recipes I've tried this year, these are the five I'll definitely be making again.

A Very Happy Birthday to Sir Isaac Newton

So we went to see the in-laws for Christmas. (Yes, we do celebrate.)

My FIL is a superior cook but has an odd aversion to vegetables, so I volunteered to make a side dish of green beans and a salad.

Here's the menu, in full:
1) caramelized liver mousse with toasted hazelnuts and macerated cherries
2) avocado-blood orange salad (not the one I made)
3) pheasant salmis and my green beans
4) cheese course, featuring Cabot clothbound cheddar, Truffle Tremor, Moses Sleeper, and Gorgonzola Dolce
5) my salad, which was an ingredient-limited riff on a roasted cranberry and delicata squash salad with candied pecans and mixed lettuce.
6) fruit course
7) Bakewell Tart with coffee

We also went through a few bottles of wine but I forgot to write down names!

Earlier in the day - before opening presents - we'd had tea and sticky buns.

And a lovely time was had by all. I hope your 25th was equally peaceful, festive, and delicious.

A long list of mediocre recipes

I've been great about trying new recipes since I went on summer break, but I haven't had much luck with actually picking the recipes. You know, they sound great when you read them, but...

Anyway, here's the handful of duds from the past couple week:

Peanut Noodles: never a fave in my house (DH prefers sesame noodles and I prefer something with fewer carbs) but my tahini had gone bad and we were hungry. So I tried a new, very easy version. Perfectly edible, but not memorable.

Kale and Lentil Stew in the Slow Cooker: DH got me a slow cooker and recipe book a few years ago. The recipes I tried were all terrible, so we gave up after 5 or 6 tries. In the course of unpacking the basement recently we located the slow cooker, so I thought I'd give it another try. This recipe is the best thing I've made in it yet, but that isn't saying much.

Greek Salad: a rare dud from Smitten Kitchen. Part of the problem may be that, first, I don't like raw peppers, and second, I didn't have any fresh oregano.

Peppers stuffed with pesto avocado: see above about me not liking raw peppers.

Vegetarian Stuffed Mushrooms: I was so entranced by the stuffed mushrooms from Blue Apocalypse that I thought I'd try to extend that love to the vegetarian side of the family. Um, no.

White Bean and Fennel Dip: it sounded so lovely in the description... and wasn't actually bad the first time out, but was just nasty as leftovers.

Chicken Poached in Milk with Tarragon and Peas: going the other way, this was intensely boring the first day, but had perked up noticeably by day 2. Still not worth doing again.

Spaghetti with Garlic and Arugula from You're Doing it Wrong: Sounded so lovely, tasted so boring. I used three HUGE cloves of very fresh garlic, which actually may have been too subtle for the dish. A smaller, older, feistier garlic may have been more effective.

New recipe count: 37

More baked goods!

Tried Slate.com's recipe for honey whole-wheat bread. It's easy and yummy, but cut the salt in half (or more) unless you like your baked goods REALLY salty.

In a desperate attempt to use up all the lousy strawberry jam, I tried this recipe for jam muffins. They turned out really well and I will definitely make them again.

Last month my husband bought a huge bag of shelled pistachios, which we aren't eating fast enough. Since I don't want the super-expensive nuts going to waste, I found a recipe for pistachio biscotti with olive oil. I was, well, dubious, and the fact that I set the oven too high and singed them didn't help... but they're really good. And different. And hard to stop eating.

And, finally, I made a terrific Italian apple cake a couple of weeks ago. It was super-easy and my kids were begging me for third helpings.

New recipe count: 29

More new recipes (a dinner for a hot day)

It reached 90F in some areas near us on Tuesday, so I was feeling inspired to do minimal cooking and serve a lot of salads. I made steamed white race (always a must when my in-laws visit), steamed broccoli (which my kids like), and a big salad of romaine, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, toasted pepitas, and some shaved hard cheese that I found in the fridge. (It might have been an aged Gouda.) Dressed it with my go-to dressing of rice wine vinegar, olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and a trickle of agave nectar. All good so far.

The two new dishes were both hits with the family. First up was a vegan potato salad. The DH is considering going partially vegan for the summer, which has me in a bit of a panic because I've spent 13 years learning how to cook vegetarian for him but this is going to seriously limit what I can make. No cheese? eggs? milk? I told him he might be eating a lot of PB&J and cereal with almond milk. Since mayo isn't vegan (and none of us likes vegan "mayo") I tried this vegan potato salad recipe from Serious Eats. It was pretty straight-forward and everyone agreed that it was really yummy, but not quite as good as a standard mayo-based potato salad. (Part of what worked so well was that I undercooked the potatoes and let them finish steaming as I peeled them, so they were just past crunchy and held together really well.)

The other new dish comes from one of my new favorite food bloggers, Jamie at Cooking in Red Sox. She recently made a decadent lemon sauce to go with seared scallops, which I had to try at home. Now I managed to end up with the wrong kind of scallops, lemons, and white wine, but the dish still tasted fantastic! Even the kids went for seconds. (Obviously the DH didn't eat this, but he did like the lemon sauce on the broccoli.)

New recipe count: 25

A bad soup and a good quick bread

Some more updates from last week:

The DH and I love cold soups, and I keep looking for the perfect vichyssoise, so I tried a new version and, alas, it was terrible. All the ingredients seemed out of proportion: the soup is rather too sweet for my liking and tastes only of leeks, and even after I doubled all the liquids it still seems far too thick. I will not be keeping this one.

On a brighter note, I dug up an old recipe for Pear Bread by Smitten Kitchen and, no surprise, it was terrific. I took it too work and convinced a wide array of people to try it - unanimous praise for its flavor and texture. Definitely a keeper!

New recipe count: 23

Catching up on more new recipes

I've been doing more cooking as we approach the end of the school year. Last weekend, I bought two flats of strawberries and tried making jam. That didn't turn out so well and now we have a lot of third-rate strawberry jam taking up space in our freezer.

Then on Tuesday inflicted some new ideas on my in-laws (they're very patient and encouraging of my cooking efforts). And finally, last night, I didn't want to tackle my pile of grading so I dove into some cooking projects instead.

The first jam recipe I used was the one on the back of the box of pectin. Yikes! Far too much sugar and far too little strawberry, plus the sugar never fully dissolved so now I have four jars of crunchy pink spread that kind of tastes like strawberries.

The second jam recipe I used tastes good, but despite cooking it for longer than required the pectin from the green apple never fully took hold, so it's much more like overcooked strawberry spread than actual jam.

Oh - and I also figured out that my candy thermometer is set about 8 degrees too low. Dang it! This is why I overcook things: the thermometer never thinks that I've quite reached the target temperature.

Blue Apocalypse is one of my new faves in food blogging. Her recipes are pretty open-ended so it takes some independence on my part to get through them, but the results have been A+ thus far. I've previously blogged about her fabulous Prawn-Stuffed Mushrooms, which I modified this time with a large handful of cilantro ground up with the shrimp. They were oh-so-yummy and next time I might serve them without the sauce, because the one I snitched from the pan (pre-sauce) was terrific on its own. I also tried her Fried Spaghetti on Tuesday and despite a little confusion about what a "paprika" is when it isn't a spice, I think it came out really well. I had some fresh mozzarella in the fridge so I served that alongside everything else.

As we head into summer I've been collecting salad recipes, and so I made this Sweet Potato Salad to accompany the two dishes from Blue Apocalypse. I couldn't find my walnuts so I had to sub pine nuts, but the salad was still delicious and different. Planning to make it again this weekend, this time with the walnuts.

I think I'll wait to report on my efforts from last night after everyone eats them for lunch.

New recipe count: 21

Broccoli Soup

Marcella Hazan's broccoli soup and pasta soup courtesy of The Wednesday Chef. Not easy, but yummy, and a great way to use up huge amounts of broccoli.

New recipe recap

Wow... getting the flu and then catching a cold right after that have really slowed me down. I tried a bunch of new recipes in March; here's a quick catch-up post on what worked and what didn't.

I tried a recipe of roasted tempeh and veggies with pomegranate molasses glaze. It wasn't AT ALL my speed, but my husband seemed to enjoy it. I might try it again with a different glaze.

On a brighter note, Smitten Kitchen struck gold again with this coconut bread. I didn't have flaked coconut so I used dried young coconut, finely chopped. Still delicious.

And another winner from Smitten Kitchen: cauliflower fritters. They didn't stick together properly but tasted delicious.

I needed to use up a bunch of Brussel sprouts and I stumbled onto this recipe of Brussel sprouts with a lime-honey-ginger glaze. Jack-pot! Quick and delicious. Definitely make again.

After we got back from Italy I wanted to try to recreate the flat-crust pizza that we ate over there. Well, I didn't get is crispy enough, but it was still yummy.

New recipe count: 17

Old favorite: shrimp fried rice

One of the first things I learned how to cook as a teenager, and STILL one of my all-time favorite dinners, is the Williams Sonoma recipe for shrimp fried rice with basil and cilantro (or, as the new version up on the website clarifies, it's khao pad bai kraprow)

Just had to rave about it here, one more time...

A dinner party of new recipes

It had been far too long since I had my advisees over for dinner (as they frequently reminded me) so I finally pulled myself together, cleaned up the house, and planned a menu.

Things I had cooked before:
brown rice
white rice
shrimp-fried rice from William Sonoma
stir-fried Chinese broccoli
cumin seed roasted cauliflower (without the dip)
longanisa (made with turkey, because one of my students doesn't eat pork)

Things I had not cooked before:
scallion pancakes from David Lebovitz: this is the Korean version, with which I'm not familiar, so while it didn't taste anything like the stuff we get from our local Chinese take-out, that was both expected and a good thing. They were easy and yummy... definitely a keeper!

Prawn-stuffed mushrooms from Blue Apocalypse: easy but not quite as stunning as I'd hoped. I wonder if adding cilantro to the shrimp mix would jack it up a level...?

Edited to add: when I was cleaning up, I realized that the only dish to be completely devoured was the prawn-stuffed mushrooms. I guess everyone else liked them even more than I did!

New recipe count: 11

Wild Mushroom Lasagna

We're all snowed in up here in New England, and probably about to lose power tonight, so we did our usual ritual of eating up and cooking up all the good stuff in the fridge. I'd been planning to make this wild mushroom lasagna all week. Since we weren't able to go shopping I had to do without ricotta, fresh thyme, or a third type of mushroom, but it was still fantastically good. I will definitely try it again with the full list of ingredients.

New recipe count: 9

Pie Crust with Vodka

I kept hearing about it during the Holiday season... make your pie crust with vodka! More tender! Easier to roll out! More flaking! Less chance of tough, overdeveloped crust!

I owed my kids an apple pie, so I went ahead and followed the recipe EXACTLY as written. Wow... it was like pancake batter! I chilled it for over an hour and it was still too tacky to roll out. I used a lot of flour to make the bottom crust release from the wax paper I was using to roll it out, and the top crust stuck to the paper so badly that I just pulled it off in strips and made an improved lattice crust.

So after all this cursing at the crust, I went back and read the comments about it - oh, I am an idiot. Should have read the comments first. Most people omitted 1 to 2 tablespoons of water in order to get a workable crust.

The verdict? Delicious! I will definitely try it again, omitting some of the water.

New recipe count: 8

Chinese Steamed Eggplant

No pictures, because it's a pale puree with leaves of cilantro tucked into it, but this Chinese Steamed Eggplant turned out to be easy and surprisingly yummy. I think it's meant to be a summer dish, but eggplants were on sale this week and I had some old cilantro in the fridge...

New recipe count: 7

A failure of curry

I have two blocks of paneer in my fridge so I've been searching for good ways to use them up. This was my first attempt: a basic paneer curry from AllRecipes.com. It was perfectly edible but really boring. (My husband, while eating it, expressed surprise that it was an Indian-derived recipe.)

New recipe count: 6