Corn Chowder

Since joining a CSA Sarah and I have made a lot of soup. To be fair I made this the day before we got our first lot of winter veggies to make room in our kitchen/pantry for them, but either way. Soup for days. Actually between all the different soups, more like soup for weeks. But moving along!

Butter! Melt it in a pot.

Onions and garlic! One onion. However many cloves of garlic make you happy. Because if there's anything you've learned about me thus far it's that almost every food should apparently have garlic and onions.

Stir occasionally until the onions start to get a little more translucent. 

Dust it with a little salt and a wee bit of cumin or curry or whatever you feel like would taste good in your corn chowder.

Dust it all with a bit of flour and stir.

Potatoes. Two or three big ones. Peeled. Diced.

Some milk. Some cream. 

CORN! Now in real life I'd just use frozen. BUT. I was making this so that I could use those five ears of corn that were sitting around. (side note: I do not love cutting corn off the cob)

I mixed 6 cups worth of Better than Bouillon with three cups worth of water and dumped it in. You could use this, actual bullion, or actual vegetable stock. I just used what I had. The other three cups of water I beat two eggs into well as seen below before dumping that in too. (I like putting eggs in corn chowder, it may give it a weird texture, but otherwise it's totally delightful).

Cook til the potatoes are soft and that's it! I stored ours in mason jars as pre-made lunches. Cause, you know the mason jar lunch is something we've been really into these days. Maybe Providence put a little hipster in us. Who knows. It's hella convenient though, I'll tell you that much. See you next Tuesday!

Microwaved Baked Potatoes

Sometimes you just want the warm starchy goodness of a baked potato. But have you ever tried baking potatoes? It takes foreverrrrrrrrrrr, not to mention that in this warm weather we're starting to have, heating up the oven is not an ideal situation. Which is why I'm here to inform you that you can make baked potatoes in the microwave, and it's way faster, won't heat up your kitchen, and you can't even tell they weren't really baked. All you have to do is wrap your potato(es) in a wet paper towel, and pop it(/them) in to either a potato baking bag or an oven mitt (we have a potato baking bag, because, well my mom got us one, and also Lilly doesn't like it when I use an oven mitt for this). 

Microwave until they are soft like a baked potato should be. Mine took about 7 minutes. I usually will put them in for 5 or 6 minutes and then check on them and add a minute or two on from there until they're done. Also make sure the paper towel is moist enough and there isn't a ton of empty dry space in the bag (I may or may not have burned a corner of the lining inside my bag :/)

Then top your potato however you like. I put veggie bacon (which isn't as bad as i expected it to be, i find I actually like it a lot in instances where I'm putting bacon in something, such as a sandwich or eggs, but would never eat it plain by itself like I do normal bacon), ranch dressing, beans salsa, and cheese on this one. 

Yum, yum, yum. Good, cheap, easy, quick, what's not to like? See you next Tuesday!

Chickpea and Potato Curry

Sometimes I think the theme of this blog may really be cheap eats. Or perhaps more accurately, I want to eat something and we haven't made time to go to a grocery store in over a week what can I make with the things we do (and usually always) have around? This is clearly one of those times. I went to make dinner and said to myself, hmm, well lets look for chickpea recipes (dear god I love the internet). I found this recipe and thought to myself, 'the curry part sounds good, and we have a bunch of naan in the freezer, so yeah, deal' (my thoughts are prolific, I know). A few notes to less obvious changes I 'made': I did not use tomatoes or spinach, we didn't have any in the house and Lilly doesn't really like tomatoes or cooked spinach anyways. I don't even know what garam masala is, so instead of 2 teaspoons of that I used a teaspoon of curry powder and a teaspoon of masala tea powder, cause that makes sense, right? I definitely had more than a teaspoon of grated ginger, I cut off a little chunk to grate that turned out to be bigger than I bargained for, I would estimate it was a least a tablespoon, maybe a smidgin more. I added coconut milk. 

I mostly just followed the recipe....and forgot to take many pictures along the way, so here's a picture of most of the ingredients on my counter. 

One day I'll learn how to make naan, from what I understand it's not that difficult to make. But for now warming up some pre-made naan in the toaster oven is more than sufficient. 

All in all, I'd make this again. Even Lilly seemed to like it as much as me! In the future however I would not use as much, if any added salt, it came out overly salty, which was fine while eating it with the naan, but still. I have a couple theories as to why that is: while I did rinse the chickpeas, they probably were still hella salty on their own, also since I didn't use tomatoes and spinach it maybe threw off how salty everything turned out. Also I did use the optional cayenne pepper, not an entire 1/4 of a teaspoon, but almost that much, and it was at the perfect level of spiciness for me, and barely noticeable spiciness for Lilly.  Next week I'll try and post something non-food related, no promises though! See you next Tuesday!

Potato Bowls

The other night I made Lilly and I a real healthy dinner (note sarcasm). It was a product of not knowing what I wanted that we had in the apartment to make for dinner. So I started with some potatoes cooked up home fry style. I used a little less oil than I normally do when making home fries, because I knew I wouldn't be taking them out of the pan or draining the oil in the cooking process. 

Once the potatoes were nearing being done, I threw in two cloves of garlic that I had minced and some chopped onion. 

 While the onions and garlic were cooking I looked in the fridge. We had an open can of black beans and an open can of kidney beans in the fridge, so in went some of each of those.

Then some salsa.

Once this had all simmered together to my likings I took it out of the pan and split it into two bowls. Topped each with shredded cheese and threw them in the microwave for long enough to melt the cheese. The I topped them off with a dollop of sour cream and sliced up an avocado. Then I dug in. Yum. See you next Tuesday kids!

Chickpea Hash Browns

It was late at night, Lilly had gone back home so I had the apartment to myself, and having eaten dinner hours ago, I was hungry and wanted something fried. Now being the sensible person I am, I figured it wasn't a smart decision to pull out some of the fries from our freezer and cook them up (they were on sale at Target, that's why we have them I swear!) I knew I should have something a little more nutritious than that. But damn, I just wanted some good ole fried ...something. That's when an idea struck me. I got out a few ingredients and made what I think is one of my more brilliant concoctions (it's also vegan and gluten free to the best of my knowledge, so this recipe is pretty baller if you ask me). 

I drained and rinsed a can of chickpeas and mashed them up to a nice pulp. Then I shredded one potato into the bowl and mixed it up. 

I chopped up half and onion and mixed that in too. Then I seasoned it with garlic powder, season salt, and curry. I added more of each after tasting the first one I cooked up, and I also dusted just a little cayenne pepper into the mix too. 

I had a pan of olive oil ready to go, so I took a handful of my mixture, balled it up and flattened it a bit, just like a mini hamburger, and fried it. I turned it over when the side facing down was a nice golden brown and let the other side reach the same point. 

After letting them blot a little on a paper towel and cool down so that I didn't scald my mouth off with them, I had the best late night snack ever. It was everything I wanted, which it's rare that I can successfully pull that feat off, since I almost never know what I want to eat when I get the late night munchies, and more importantly, if I do know what I want it's usually not easily available to me when I want it. This however, was a total and udder late night snacking success. Somewhere between a falafel  a hash brown, and a crispy fried taste of heaven. Okay, that last part was a bit of an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. I high suggest you try this, and I'll see you next Tuesday!