Three Weeks Down!

Posted on by Jordan

Today marks the end of three weeks in the Goals In Motion ‘Challenge’.

That leaves six to go, and I am counting 🙂

The interesting thing is that I rather enjoy the workouts, I just don’t like getting up that early, or what getting up that early does to my evenings. In case I haven’t mentioned it, we get up at 4:20 in order to make the 5:15 workout.

Beyond the changes to our sleep schedule, our eating changes have been more significant than expected. Heather and I did another challenge a while back that included an eating program, although it was self moderated. With the current program we have an assigned coach / mentor. She has been incredibly helpful! We already had the basic principals from before, but she has really helped us fine-tune it. One of the tools we have been using is a website called “The Daily Plate,” that provides a nice nutritional tracking tool.  To be honest, the site is clunky and less than user friendly, but it’s free and gives us and our coaches access to the information we want.

Because of our nutritional goals, I have been really looking for new things to cook. I tried a few noteworthy things over the past few weeks.

First up was “Stickless Shish-Kabab“only I cut back the oil in the marinade, and made it with chicken.

I discovered a number of things that were somewhat exciting in the process. First up is the fact that our oven, although lacking the traditional gas oven broiler pan, has broiler settings to ether turn the top or bottom heating element on constantly. This gave me a lot more control when broiling than I have ever had with an oven before. The option to just turn on the bottom element will come in to play once pizza is back on the menu. The second thing I discovered is that the stores have yellow squash in stock, and that Heather and I both rather like them grilled. We have grilled them a few times already, after ‘discovering’ them in this recipe.

The second thing I tried was “Whole Wheat Pasta with Asparagus.” I don’t really think I set out to modify this recipe, I just didn’t quite have the right stuff on hand. I don’t know if the kind of sausage called for was what I used, but it was really hard to skin, so I just chopped it up and did slices instead. Beyond that change I think it was basically what the recipe called for. The results were really good, and I think I may have converted Heather to liking Asparagus.

The final new item we tried was a notable strikeout. After our success with grilled squash, we were eager to try to expand our arsenal of grilling options, so we thought eggplant might be a good thing to try. Normally I would have avoided eggplant, but i figured we were on such a role with new things that it might be really good. (pictured here, hot off the grill)

It wasn’t terrible… but it wasn’t great ether. I know there are recipes that dress eggplant up a lot more, and I think we may need to look into those. Heather mentioned having really liked eggplant in Spain, but that it was breaded, fried, and drizzled with honey. Hopefully we won’t have to go to those lengths, but as it stands now eggplant isn’t on our veggie good-list.

-Jordan

Banana-Peanut-Butter Ice Cream

Posted on by Jordan

I feel kind of dumb right now. I spent five or so minutes looking, and it appears I never actually posted the pictures of the banana ice cream back when Heather and I first tried making it.

Let me bring you up to speed on the situation:

  1. Heather basically will not eat refined sugar
  2. I like desserts
  3. I would like to share said deserts with Heather

Because of point one, I spent a lot of time looking around for something I could make. I have had some success with making peanut butter balls. That recipe involved Splenda, and at some point Heather soured on the idea of eating fake sugar too. About that time I read that you could run a frozen banana through a blender / food processor and get an ice cream like result. We tried it shortly thereafter, and the results were a huge hit!

I learned a few things such as, peeling the bananas beforehand is important! I nearly removed my thumb peeling a frozen banana with one of our wonderfully sharp knives. We were in Atlantic at the time, and cleaning the blender without a dishwasher was a huge pain.

jumping back to ‘now’, and we have a food-processor that was given to us for Christmas. What I have discovered is that making this dish in a food processor is about twenty times easier. With a blender I was having to scrape the sides of the dish repeatedly to get all the banana blended. The food processor doesn’t seem to need as much attention. It also doesn’t hurt that we have a dishwasher, so cleanup is more or less “free”.

All of that to introduce the how-to video! Enjoy! 🙂

-Jordan

This Weekend, In Staying Warm

Posted on by Jordan

It remains really cold around Des Moines. I think the average temps are about 8-10 below historical norms for the month. Also, I read that we are only a few inches away from having the largest snowfall *ever recorded* in a single winter. I don’t know how close to the record we really are, but the only year we haven’t topped was about 130 years back.

So, that’s the context for why we have been staying inside 🙂

Friday Night: I made another pizza. Rolled some of the things I learned from the deep-dish pizza into a more traditional pizza, to see what I could come up with. I put the stone at the bottom of the oven, a cookie sheet at the top and started the pizza in a cold oven. The end result was a really crisp bottom crust, without burning the top. I think I got kinda lucky with the whole thing as the crust was nearly burnt, but I think I prefer that to being uncooked at the middle.

Saturday: I went to the church mens breakfast. It makes me feel terribly grown up to do that kind of thing. I suppose, given my age, job, wife… etc. I am in fact grown up. Still seems odd. Had a good time there, and somehow ended up cleaning parts of the church before I headed home.

When I got home, Heather and I tackled the second bedroom. I had worked on it a little mid-week, but there was sooooo much still waiting to be done. I have to give a lot of credit to Heather, because she did most of the work, and stuck with it until the room was fully cleaned out! When I say fully cleaned out, it still has two portable coat rack things, and two bookshelves in it, but at least there aren’t any piles on the floor, and it feels like a real room now.

We were talking about good “stay inside and be warm foods” and Heather thought chicken pot pie sounded good. I think maybe to get me out of the kind of small room she thought I should make it :).

I ended up settling on this recipe: Chicken Pot Pie IX

It went together really well, my only problem was that rolling out the crust before I started making the filling meant that the texture of the top crust was really soft. I think I would have had an easier time cutting the “N over N” into the top if I hadn’t rolled it out 30 minutes ago, or maybe at least laying that in the fridge to keep it firm.

That’s filling pre-gravy-ish step. That’s also the last picture I got with my camera before the battery gave out. I somehow lost my charger over the past few weeks. (I ordered a new one a few hours ago, so I should find it any minute now)

The only thing you should note in that picture is I forgot the peas. I was also going to add some corn… forgot both.

Finished product:

That’s a cell phone picture… not quite the quality I normally provide, but you get the idea. The finished product was really good.

Sunday: Heather has gotten really into coupons. I don’t think I have mentioned it here before. She got this Coupon Mom book and has really gotten into the game of finding deals. One of the deals she found is that the local gas station will give you a free Sunday paper if you get more than $10 in gas Sunday. The Sunday paper it seems, is the predominant source of coupons for the western world.  Heather and I both filled our cars up before church so that we could get two papers.

After lunch, Heather clipped coupons and planned a big grocery run, while I put on our Iowa plates ( a sad, sad day 😦 )  This did kind of ruin my “stay inside” plan, but it had to be done. I also stashed quite a few boxes in the rafters of our garage. The garage is really the only way our second bedroom is going to be open enough to get a bed into. I am glad to say we are on-track for that to actually happen now.

-Jordan

Pumpkin Pancakes

Posted on by Jordan

This isn’t really the post I had planned for the weekend, but I managed to reproduce a good pumpkin pancake this morning, and wanted to document it. 🙂

Jordan’s Pumpkin Pancakes:

  • 1 cup of Hungry Jack Complete Wheat Blends pancake mix
  • 3/4 cup water ( just like the box calls for)
  • 1/2 cup pumpkin puree, thinned

Mix the pancake mix with water as directed on the box.

Mix canned pumpkin with water until the consistency is roughly the same as the pancake batter.

Add 1/2 cup of the pumpkin mix to the pancake batter. Cook like you would a normal pancake, being aware that the pumpkin holds a lot of water so they are going to cook slower.

That felt really over-dramatic for some reason. All the same, writing this down is important! Heather really likes pumpkin things, and I knew pumpkin pancakes are possible. The problem is that the canned pumpkin can hold a lot of water before thinning down. For no good reason I never actually looked up a recipe for this, and just kind of winged it. The first time I tried this, things went rather well. In the subsequent three or four times I was unable to get a good water / pumpkin balance. Too much pumpkin makes the pancakes act like sponges. You can get a nice crust on the outside, but they will be runny in the middle still.

I think the secret is to mix water into the pumpkin before you add it to the pancakes, meaning you don’t have to mess with adding water to the entire batter mix. The other key seems to be not adding too much of the pumpkin mix. I was disappointed that the pumpkin flavor wasn’t prominent in the pancakes. Adding more pumpkin means adding more water, and the end result isn’t very pancake like. I think perhaps adding some cinnamon and nutmeg, or “pumpkin pie spice” might bring out the pumpkin flavor more, but I think a half-cup is the limit for actual pumpkin.

Now I have to remember to check my blog before I try to make these again. 🙂

-Jordan

Pizza!

Posted on by Jordan

One thing I can say for certain, is that it is January here.  The past week has felt almost tropical, when the temperature slipped above freezing for a few hours during the day. The piles of snow around our apartment are so large you cannot see over them anymore. To put it gently, there isn’t much to make you want to go outside.

With that in mind I have been looking for interesting cooking projects.  One I found was for a Chicago style pizza that looked interesting.

I ended up using a recipe my mom gave me for the crust instead of the one listed, used normal sauce instead of the diced tomatoes, hamburger instead of sausage, and an electric oven instead of gas. So pretty much I only used a small fraction of the guys idea, but still….

Anyway, the dough covered a much larger area than I really needed, so it kind of flopped over the edges. I figured I could deal with that later, and added quite a bit of hamburger.

This is about the time I realized I hadn’t really planned out how closely I was going to stick to the advice online, because I didn’t want to try the diced tomatoes track. I figured some garlic couldn’t hurt though, so I chopped up a few cloves and dumped them in. I sprinkled in some oregano too for good measure. Then I topped that with *a lot* of cheese and some mushrooms.

There was still room left in the skillet, but I didn’t think it would be a good idea to use any more mushrooms. I still had a little hamburger left though, so I used the last of that. Then I added the remains of a can of Prego red sauce. I was really afraid this would make things too runny, but the hamburger and mushrooms seemed to be soaking it up really well.

Again, I realized that I wasn’t planning too well. The pseudo recipe I was using appeared to use pepperoni to kind of shield the top of the pizza from burning. I think the comment said something about the top getting “crispy like bacon” but at the same time it wasn’t going to seem very pizza-like if I didn’t at least put cheese on the top. In hindsight, the one time I had pizza in Chicago, they clearly baked the pizza, then added the sauce right before they brought it out. That pizza was different than what I was shooting for here anyway. I ended up adding some cheese.

As you can see, I also trimmed off the extra dough around the edges. At this point I used the tip somebody posted later on in that pizza thread I was using as a recipe, and placed the pan at the bottom of the oven, and a cookie sheet on a rack clear at the top. Then I set the oven for 500, waited for it to get up to temp, and backed it off to 400. The only thing I did that may have changed cooking conditions was I swapped out the top cookie sheet for one that had bread stick things from the extra crust for a few minutes after I turned the temp down. The final result looked promising.

The crust had a lot of structural strength, and didn’t stick to the pan at all (did I mention I had aggressively  rubbed butter on the pan before I started?). I was able to lift and slide the pizza out without any problems.

Cutting it up was a little difficult, due to the fact that it was a little soupy. I was initially afraid that was from too much sauce, but it turned out that was just because the cheese was still melted.

After just a few more minutes things began to set a little more, and we ended up with nice thick pie-like slices.

I was quite happy with the end result. It took way longer than I had planned, partially due to the prep time on the dough for the crust, and partially due to the cook-time being a lot longer than the ~40 minutes I was expecting (pre-heat takes more than 10 minutes when you go up to 500). The crust was good, but nothing like the “pan” pizza from say Pizza Hut. I shudder to think how much oil I would have to use to get that effect. I think I am happy with the effect I got, and I don’t see a reason to pack a ton more fat into what isn’t really health food as it stands, I was just expecting something different.

So to summarize:

  • Grease the skillet, but don’t expect a fried-bread crust
  • Electric ovens seem to work fine, if you use a blocking sheet for the top element
  • Cheese only works as a topping, although I would like to try pepperoni next time
  • Plan ahead so you have 2+ hours to make this before you want to eat

-Jordan

Coffee!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I are just winding down our first weekend in Des Moines for 2010.

One of the great things I got for Christmas was a coffee maker! Somehow A year ago this time, I didn’t really drink coffee. This meant that we didn’t put a coffee maker on our registry or buy it when we were equipping our new household. I don’t really know how I made the transition, but at this point it seems like I have always liked coffee. This has been a slight problem on weekends, because I really missed having it to start my day off with. Needless to say, I was excited to get the chance to try out making a pot of my own this weekend.

…

Heather always makes fun of my taking pictures for the blog, and just now I realize I didn’t get a picture of that momentous occasion. I guess you will have to use your imagination.

Anyway, the coffee was great, and I think adds a lot to a relaxing Saturday morning.

I did however find that I may be making it all wrong

I just don’t see it being worth all the work those guys go to for a *small* cup of coffee.

-Jordan

Merry Christmas!

Posted on by Jordan

HerbieTree

Heather and I have a (short) tradition of getting a new ornament every year. Herbie got the honors this year… Heather sometimes talks like I am the only one who feels weird about being in Iowa, but I think we both have strong allegiances there. We have the same little tree from last year, it works really well in our space-limited apartment. We still don’t have many Christmas decorations, but the tree does a lot to make the apartment feel the holiday spirit.

Speaking of the holiday spirit, Heather and I have discovered that we listened to different Christmas music while doing traditional things like decorating the tree…. and I find that I don’t feel as into it without that. Heather’s tradition is to watch “White Christmas” during/after the tree decorating. I know my family always listened to the same albums of Christmas music… I just don’t know what those albums were called. Heather has actually accused me of being “a scrooge” but I just don’t care for some of the more…. artistic interpretations of traditional Christmas songs.

Along with tree decorating, Heather spearheaded baking some Christmas treats. More than spearheaded, I didn’t even help. Not to say I wasn’t willing, but we have found that only one person should work in our galley kitchen at a time. It only takes a few times bumping into the other person when you are trying to quick get something done to think it isn’t fun anymore. After making some amazing cookies, Heather broke them up into a bunch of gift plates:

HeatherCookies

We then worked our way around the building giving them away to any of our neighbors who happened to be home. It was a fun thing to do, and I am really glad she took the initiative to do it. I think about half our neighbors weren’t sure what to think, but it’s hard to complain about a plate of cookies!

I know this is a few days early, but we are looking to slip out of Des Moines before another wave of ice and snow shuts the city down, so I probably won’t get the chance to post closer to the actual day…. Merry Christmas!!!

-Jordan

p.s. I don’t think I ever mentioned before, the ornament from last year was a sand timer… we only had a month until the wedding at Christmas 🙂

Cooking!

Posted on by Jordan

This ends up being kind of a compound post, summing up most of the interesting cooking I have done from when we moved to Atlantic, up till tonight.

First off, I tried making hash browns:

Hashbrowns

This is actually my second attempt. The first attempt was *amazing* I was really happy with the appearance, texture, flavor everything. Heather felt that my first batch was nothing but butter, so the pictured hash browns have minimal oil. They aren’t as good that way, but still make for some nice variety, we pretty much eat nothing but oatmeal weekdays.

Next up, stuffed peppers:

Suffed_peppers

Red peppers are fairly cheap right now, and I happened to see some remarks on a blog I follow about making some stuffed peppers. Heather and I have talked a lot about how introducing more vegetables into our diet would be a good thing, but haven’t necessarily done a great job of actually executing that plan. This was a step in that direction, these basically just have beans, rice and cheese in them. They took forever to make as I discovered mid-recipe that I couldn’t run the stove-top burners to simmer the onions and cook the rice at the same time as I preheat the oven. The end result was pretty good even then, just a little slow… Something that frustrates Heather I think, but she was happy with the end result 🙂

Finally, something more interesting, “Fettuccine with Sweet Pepper-Cayenne“:

J_Pepper_Chop

Hey look! An action shot! 🙂 I sometimes get complaints about the dis-proportional number of pictures containing Heather vs. me. Hopefully this will be a step towards having a full time photographer for cooking related blog posts 😉

The full gallery of cooking pictures has a few of this recipe in-progress, and a finished product shot, if your interested check: here.

Not to get into a full play-by-play, but basically the cayenne made the sauce splicer than I had really planned, but fortunately Heather tolerates moderately spicy stuff pretty well. The texture and consistency ended up being a lot like stroganoff, but with a lot more kick. I am kind of proud of this one, not that it took any real skill, but it was something new that I didn’t exactly know what the end result would be like, and it came out pretty well.

I suppose if I am going to summarize all the cooking in September I should mention I made chili, but I don’t have any pictures of that. Really though, how exciting is chili? … I guess I have a kind of orphaned gallery I put up a long time ago of probably the last chili I made before my cooking had to take Heather into account. The gallery here has probably more onions than I have used in a single setting for almost two years. That chili is more interesting than the stuff I made last week 🙂 Not to say the new batch isn’t good, just not as interesting. … and now I am rambling

-Jordan

Closing Out June With Cooking and Cleaning!

Posted on by Jordan

For the last weekend in June, Heather and I spend Saturday with her parents at a family friend’s house on a sandpit lake. It was amazingly relaxing, but owing to the fact that we are both “fair skinned” we spent the entire time setting in the shade and reading. That kind of activity didn’t produce much in the way of photo opportunities.

On Sunday we had a lazy morning, went to church, and then decided we should restock our freezer. We had completely depleted our stock of easy lunches to grab to take to work.

I started off making meatballs:

JordanMeatballs_tmb

The meatballs are the only thing I even attempted to figure out the cost per serving on. I had planned to do it for each item, but I forgot about it and threw away the receipt. The meatballs produced six servings of five meatballs each, and each serving comes out to be roughly $0.90. Drop the frozen meatballs in with some cooked pasta or rice, and some sauce and they make a great lunch.

After the meatballs I made some Italian sausage pasta and bean casserole stuff…

( An in-progress shot)

sausageInThePot_thmb

it probably has a better name than that I can’t think of right now. At any rate, it was very good. We had some for a rather late lunch, and then ended up with five servings to freeze.

After the late lunch, I started trimming chicken.

Twelve pounds later:

trimmed_chicken_tmb

once the chicken was trimmed, I made chicken noodle soup with some, grilled quite a bit, and Heather loaded a crockpot to make chicken and rice.

I kind of messed up the soup… I haven’t quite figured out how to avoid having really bland chunks of chicken in the soup. I guess the Campbell’s answer is to grind the chicken up into small pieces. My plan next time, if I remember, is to saute the chicken with some garlic and olive oil before I add the chicken stock. I could try looking at a recipes or something too I suppose.

The soup made seven servings and, the two types of seasonings I used on the grilled chicken made seven and eight servings respectively.

We didn’t start the chicken and rice meal until the next morning. Unfortunately we didn’t anticipate how much water the rice would soak up over night, or the fact that our work day is two – three hours longer than the recipe said to cook it for. The end result was eatable, but not great. I have the remains in the fridge, but Heather informs me she will not be taking any of it for lunches.

I should also point out, Heather was cleaning most of the afternoon. If it sounds like I am taking too much credit, it’s because Heather was doing other things. I could have taken pictures of her, but I don’t think she felt it necessary to document vacuuming. 🙂

-Jordan