A life without ice cream is no life at all

Tonight I very excitedly used a recipe in my new Food Network magazine to make Thai Red Curry Mahi Mahi Salad.

Quite a name, right?  It was quite a recipe.  I think it actually would have turned out well, except I’m scared of my broiler and so I couldn’t follow the directions.  I have a broiler, but it’s one of those ones at the very bottom of a very small, very old oven, and every time I open it I freak out a little.

So, I just stuck the fish in the oven, which didn’t get it all brown and crispy like the ones in the picture.  I actually didn’t really like the fish at all, probably for this reason.  I gave almost my whole piece to Chris in exchange for his cucumbers and red peppers.  The salad dressing, by the way, is pretty awesome.

In other news, I found out the other day that I am probably lactose intolerant, which is mildly depressing.  I am not supposed to eat any dairy for two weeks, just to test the situation, I guess.  I’m actually fine with the whole milk and cheese thing, although it cuts back on my cottage cheese progress significantly.  I’m more so concerned about things like Sun Chips and ice cream and milk chocolate and and yogurt and ice cream and cookies and ice cream and cake and, seriously, what the hell am I supposed to have for a snack?  Today I had an apple and peanut butter, but yesterday I popped a bag of popcorn, realized buttered popcorn = dairy, and had to throw it away.

And, by the way, this means that I won’t be getting my abs of steel via Jay Robb whey protein any time soon.  Because obviously, that’s the only thing standing in my way.

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Mac and Cheese

Sorry, terrible picture.  I’d already started scooping Chris’s portion out, and I was all crooked or something.  I wasn’t even drinking.  Odd.

Anyway, I used Ellie Krieger’s recipe as inspiration here, but I made a bunch of changes to make use of what we had and to up the cheese factor because, well, we are cheese people around here. 

Recipe:

• Four ounces whole wheat penne
• 1 1/2 cups pureed butternut squash
• 1 cup skim milk
• 1 cup shredded reduced-fat cheese (I used Trader Joe’s medley of Monterrey Jack, cheddar and mozzarella
• 1/4 cup shredded sharp cheddar
• 1 ounce fresh mozzarella, diced
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan
• 1 teaspoon dijon mustard
• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 3 T bread crumbs
• salt, pepper

Boil the penne until still slightly undercooked, about seven minutes.  While that’s cooking, add the butternut squash (see these instructions for how to cook and puree the squash) and milk to a sauce pan and heat through.  Once it starts to thicken and bubble, turn off the heat and add 3/4 of the reduced-fat cheese, half of the parmesan, all of the sharp cheddar and stir until melted.  Add the mustard, the red pepper flakes, and salt/pepper to taste. Mix the cooked pasta with the squash mixture, then spread into a greased baking dish.  Sprinkle on the rest of the cheese, including the diced fresh mozzarella, then top with bread crumbs and the rest of the parmesan.  Bake at 375 for 15 minutes, until the top starts to brown.

We had ours on Saturday with salad:

And here’s my mac and cheese plate:

It was good.  Really good, actually.  Not quite like traditional mac and cheese, but then again, it doesn’t make you feel like you gained 14 pounds during dinner, either.  Chris even ate the leftovers the next day.  Should I repeat that?  I feel like I should, because that never happens.

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Pizza and ice cream make a good pair

We had leftover pizza dough in the freezer from the calzones, so I made us each a little mini pizza tonight.  Chris just had mozzarella, spinach and sauce on his, but I got a little carried away and added goat cheese, onions and mushrooms to mine instead of the sauce:

The flash on my camera really highlighted the goat cheese, huh.  Looks kind of weird.  Anyway, they were good.  I’m loving this Trader Joe’s pizza dough.  It’s so much easier than making it myself and it tastes the same.

We had salad, too:

Mine was kind of half eaten when I took the picture, sorry.

But by far, the best part of the night was this:

Snickers Ice Cream Bars! Yikes was I excited when I saw these.  I would like to blame them on Chris, much like the Reese’s incident, but this was all me.  Look at this amazing thing:

It was so worth it.

And now I must go because Chris needs to use the computer to make believe he’s a football coach and draft a fantasy team or some such nonsense.

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Enchiladas!

As promised…

I know, the picture is terrible.  I meant to get batteries today while I was out and I forgot.  I have come to realize that the man at the bodega on my block was selling me Duracell knock offs, which explained why they only lasted approximately three hours.

Anyway, enchiladas:

1/2 lb shrimp

4 – 5 mushrooms

1/4 cup red onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic

5 small whole wheat tortillas

1 bunch cilantro

1 scallion

shredded cheese (I used a Mexican blend)

Couple splashes worcestershire sauce

1 cup (approximately) of enchilada sauce.  I used Trader Joe’s, which tasted just like Taco Bell’s red sauce and made me want a bean burrito in a bad way.  You can use the canned kind, or make your own if you’re some kind of super star.

Saute the onion and garlic over low heat, then add the sliced mushrooms.  Cut the shrimp up into smallish bite sized pieces and cook until they are just barely starting to turn pink.  Add the worcestershire sauce, the cilantro, and the scallion and turn off the heat.

Pour a little of the enchilada sauce (1/4 cup or so) on the bottom of a baking dish, then fill each tortilla with 1/5 of the shrimp mixture and a tiny bit of cheese.  Put into the dish seam-side down, and cover with remaining enchilada sauce and a lot of cheese.  I mean a lot.  Smother those things, seriously.  Calcium.

Bake at 375 for 20 minutes or so, until the sauce is bubbling and the cheese is melted.

They were really good!  Very spicy, I had to mix in some plain yogurt.  But that has more to do with the enchilada sauce I bought than the recipe itself.  I’m just glad I didn’t add any more spices to the shrimp mixture.  I tend to go a little crazy sometimes.

We had ours with a salad:

And now I must go play fetch in our eight-foot hallway with Jack.   We had a little argument earlier (apparently he doesn’t like it when I stick the empty toilet paper roll on his tail) and I need to make amends.

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Bonne Maman is lying to me

I am including lunch today as an extra special bonus.  Get excited.

It’s a salad.  But not just any salad.  No.  This is a pear and goat cheese salad.  The pear was a little iffy – borderline rotten, I’ll admit – but this still tasted good because goat cheese tastes good and I would eat it on pretty much anything.  Today I chose to eat it on romaine lettuce and walnuts.  I also had some strawberries:

Surprising, I know.  But don’t forget about the goat cheese and pear salad, which is new and different.

Then this afternoon I had some yogurt:

There is jam in it.  Some more jam actually went right from the jar into my mouth:

This stuff is disappearing so fast, it scares me.  I think I might have to write to the company because I am 99% sure that there absolutely are not 18 servings in this little jar.  Six, tops.

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Baffled

I don’t understand tofu.  I try and I try and I try, but I just can’t get it right.

Tonight, I tried the freezer method, which I thought was finally going to be the answer to all of my tofu questions.  You drain it, freeze it, defrost it, then squeeze the water out again.

It was a bust.  As soon as I started squeezing the water out, my block turned into a bunch of tofu crumbs.

I just don’t get it.  Is tofu really that fragile?  Has anyone ever had the baked tofu from Whole Foods?  Because it is really good.  Is the person at Whole Foods who cooks the tofu a magician?  WHAT IS THE SECRET?

I would appreciate some enlightenment in the comments.

Anyway, Whole Foods’ baked tofu would have laughed in the face of my tofu crumb salad tonight, but to be honest, it didn’t taste all that bad:

Ingredients:  Romaine lettuce, carrots, bean sprouts, cucumbers, chick peas, tofu crumbs, mushrooms and Trader Joe’s sesame ginger dressing.

It was the hugest salad ever, I’m pretty sure.  I still ate it all, but I’m not so sure I should have.  I’m rather full right now, even after taking Jack on an extra long and annoyingly rambunctious walk.

This afternoon, I had yet another round of figs:

This time with plain yogurt and honey.

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Let’s see what we have…

Alright.  I slacked off a little last night and today with the photographs.  I had a bunch of errands to run this morning and then I had to help my friend move and between these two things, I ate:

Leftovers from Thursday for lunch, to which I added lettuce and salsa to make a little taco salad.  No chips, though.  Bummer.

Yogurt and strawberries and a little granola for a snack this afternoon.

And I also had breakfast, of course, but it was the same old, same old.  Oh, and an ice cream sandwich after lunch.  Yeah.

Last night, we had a boring dinner so I didn’t photograph it, and then I ate one of those Edy’s ice cream bars.  Then, I drank some wine, so this happened:

But I just had that handful, which is pretty good for me when I’m on the wine.

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Me, Me, Me

As if I don’t talk about myself enough, I got tagged to write five things about myself by Cara and Jenny. They want to know more. Here is what I am to do:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself.
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names, linking to them.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

Okay. So. Here we go.

1. I really, really, really hate when my food touches on my plate. I use a different plate for everything. Which sucks because we don’t have a dishwasher. Unless you count Chris. Which, for the record, I do.

2. I am obsessed with cooking shows. My family may have been the last in the country to get cable television, so I watched the ones on PBS when I was little. I also used to get in my sandbox and make mud pies and “talk to my audience.”

3. I do not understand music and movies, which are things that everyone else likes and so this makes me weird. I always pick horribly stupid movies, and things like band names, song titles and lyrics just don’t stick with me.

4. I had a hamster when I was little, which I creatively named Hamy.

5. I am from West Virginia. Because of this, I am not so good at living in a city. For instance, I always forget to lock our apartment door when I am inside. Chris hates this. Also, sometimes he comes home and knocks just to see if I’ll ask who it is before I let him in. I consistently fail this test.

*********

And now, on to the food. I had my salad last night, with a piece of the strange bread I had to buy at the grocery store because it was the only loaf that didn’t have HFCS:

It’s kind of good bread. Kind of not. I can’t decide. It’s called Healthy Delite, and apparently it’s “Made From the Old Country.” Or so the package says. I’m not quite sure what this means, but I fell for it. It sounds good, right? I also don’t know why it’s “lite.” It is 80 calories a slice, which is relatively standard in my experience.

This, however, was a HUGE slice, like three times the size of all the others, but like I said, the package clearly states that it is 80 calories a slice and someone from the Old Country cut this into one slice so it can’t possibly be more than 80 calories, am I right?

I also had this, which you may or may not think is weird:

Strawberry fruit spread and pretzels. I am on the verge of a strawberry fruit spread addiction. It is my new thing.

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Success!

The food processor owed me one after last night, and the pesto turned out great. Not that pesto is hard or anything, but whatever. Let’s not forget that I’m an amateur processor.

I remembered that Rachael Ray has a recipe for pesto where she replaces some of the olive oil with chicken stock, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find it online. I didn’t look very hard. I made up my own, and put it with some Trader Joe’s cheese tortellini and sun-dried tomatoes. Which would have been good in the pesto. I didn’t think of that until right now. Damn.

I just had a little, because I am a loving and generous girlfriend and Chris can eat a package of tortellini on his own, so I didn’t want him to starve to death because I took half. But I didn’t even finish this, because I made this salad to go with it:

Sorry about the Tupperware, but did I mention we don’t have a dishwasher?

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Getting my greens

Alright, back in action. Sorry for the little hiatus. You didn’t miss much though. Mesa Grill was AMAZING and I would like Chris to take me there every weekend, please. Unfortunately, I did not come out of the meal with a deal for my own cooking show, but there’s always next time. I’m not a quitter.

I also turned 25 yesterday. This basically just means that I can rent cars, which, let’s be honest, is more a present for Chris than it is for me. Guess I can kiss sleeping straight through long car trips goodbye. I’m working on a new strategy, though. It’s called running red lights. A couple close calls and I’ll be back in the passenger seat for good.

Anyway, back to the food. I ate this for breakfast, which is a little weird:

Salad from dinner last night, to which I added cucumbers and mushrooms. It also has sun dried tomatoes, lentils, feta and chick peas. Good stuff. And now that I’ve knocked all my veggies out first thing, I can eat chocolate for the rest of the day. It’s my birthday week.

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