little miss cocoa

Instant happiness is easy. Dr. Phil would have you believe otherwise. He is making a lot of money by convincing people that happiness cannot be found in the supermarket (Oprah does the same).

Here are the ingredients: tomatoes, mozzarella, basil.

Yum. Easy. Happiness.

Okay, it might take a little more preparation than that. Here’s how I do it: tear a ball of mozzarella into bite sized pieces. Take a pint of cherry tomatoes and cut each one in half. Tear up the basil into pieces. Toss together, with about two tablespoons of olive oil and one tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. Crack some salt and pepper over top, and serve with a baguette.

My friend B came for lunch today, after a year in Iowa. I fed her Instant Happiness. We ate cherries, too, and cold drinks, and strawberry coconut sorbet. We read her poems, which were lovely, sad and true. We told stories and laughed. We took photographs in Rittenhouse Square with my zoom lens. It was a happy day. Even Dr. Phil would have been happy, if he hadn’t been so perfectly, stupidly unnecessary.

When I walked into my apartment for the first time, I was charmed by the high ceilings and subway tiles in the bathroom, the little eat-in kitchen, the recessed nook in the hallway with a small cabinet underneath, and then I walked into the main room. There, at the far end, rimmed with blue and white tiles with flowers and Dutch scenes printed on them, was a fireplace.

‘Does it work?’ I asked, my heart beating very fast (I am not kidding about this, it was akin to love at first sight).

‘I don’t know,” said the real estate agent.

‘I’ll take it!’

I figured I’d take my chances, and at least fill the fireplace with sparkly lights. But the fireplace DID indeed work (I stuck a lit match into it and watched for a draft) and I was soon having friends over for warm times by the fire.

I’ve gotten in the habit of making potatoes during fireplace nights: hearty, warm, and delicious when wood-toasted. So here’s what I do:

Wash one pound of small potatoes and boil for about 10-15 minutes. Fish them out and chop them in half. Then layer several two foot sheets of tin foil over each other (I like to put them lengthwise, then cross the next on top, then cross the next on top, so the long ends go in different directions) and place the potatoes in the middle. Drizzle olive oil on top, with maybe a few pats of butter. Then chop up half an onion (I like to use Vidalia) in about half inch pieces (or bigger or smaller, depending on what you like) and sprinkle around the potatoes. Also de-sprig two or three sprigs of rosemary, maybe give them a quick chop, and sprinkle those on top. Finally, shake on some sea salt and freshly ground pepper. I usually do a little mixing around, just to get rosemary and onion into the crevices.

Now place the potatoes in the middle of the tin foil, and wrap the whole heap up, covering them as completely as possible with each layer of foil. At the end, you should have a sort of foil bomb. Stick the bomb in the fire. I’m not kidding. Stick it. In the fire. My friends and I have never come to a clear consensus on how to best do this. Sometimes we stick it on top of the fire, sometimes on the side, sometimes IN the fire directly (which makes S very nervous). But after about 25 minutes, we take the potatoes off and they are ALWAYS DELICIOUS.

This also works fine on a barbecue. Just put the bomb on top of the grill and keep the fire going for 25 minutes or so. At the end, ALWAYS DELICIOUS POTATOES.

To be fair, it isn’t hard to make delicious potatoes. But these potatoes are slightly crispy on certain edges, soft and warm everywhere else, with a lovely baked on onion and rosemary skin. We usually eat with our fingers. Or I do. Whatever. Point is: DELICIOUS POTATOES.

Tonight I took the trolley to K’s for some summer grilling. We (by which I mean she, as I photographed her cat) pulled the grill up from the basement and set it up in the backyard as mosquitoes swarmed around K’s legs. Though I was of very little help while setting up the grill and coals (there were kittens, Kittens! in the adjacent lot), I eventually made myself useful in the kitchen preparing potatoes, corn, and strawberries.

So, in the tradition of what I hope are delicious recipes, here’s what I’ve got this time: grilled strawberries with whipped cream.

Wash and cut the stems off a pound of strawberries, and then set them cut side down in an ovenproof baking pan. I used a pan roughly 9X9 and they fit perfectly. Shake cinnamon over along with about a teaspoon of vanilla extract, then sprinkle brown sugar on top (honey would probably also work quite well).

Now comes the fun part, whipping the cream! Pour a pint of heavy cream into a large, round bottomed mixing bowl and add a couple tablespoons of white sugar, depending on how much you like sweet cream. We didn’t have any sugar, and I don’t like my whipped cream very sweet anyway, so I squirted in some agave nectar and it worked great. Then we set A’s friend to work whipping up a storm with a plastic bowl and whisk. He was a little too gentle, so A took over and whipped it good. You can pretty much tell when whipped cream is done, it becomes nice and stiff, and once that happens, STOP!!! If you whip too hard, it turns into butter, which is also cool, but doesn’t go quite as well with strawberries. (Does it? Somebody try it and tell me if buttered strawberries are any good.)

I also took some thin ginger cookies and crumbled them into a separate bowl.

When you’re almost ready for dessert, put the strawberries on the grill and let them heat up for about five minutes. They should emerge nice and hot. Serve with whipped cream and the crumbled cookies on top. If you’ve got fresh mint, a few sprigs on top would be delicious, too!

Voila! A super easy, incredibly tasty end to a grilled night. Afterwards, we sat around the table in the dark, listening to all the backyards around us and occasionally waving our arms in unison when the porch lights’ motion sensors couldn’t see us. ‘Hello!!!’ we waved, and they came back on.

Granola bars look so healthy in the store, up on the shelf by the energy bars and fruit leather and bottled water. Then you look at the nutrition facts, and they have pretty much no nutritional value. And then you look at the ingredients and there are all kinds of unpronounceables along with, horror of horrors, high fructose corn syrup.

So I made my own:

Preheat oven to 350 and grease a 9X13 inch pan. I didn’t have one, so I just greased up a much larger pan and made a sort of granola mat, or pancake.

Mix thoroughly with your hands: 3 cups quick cooking oats, 1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk, 1 cup flaked coconut, and 3.5 cups assorted nuts, berries, and chocolate chips.

Spread about 1/2 inch thick in your pan, and bake for 20 minutes. When they’ve cooled for about 5 minutes, cut them into bars, and then wait for them to cool all the way.

Reasons why this recipe is seriously superior to the store-bought kind:

1. I always have half-eaten bags of nuts and dried fruit lying around, and I never can bring myself to finish a whole bag (there’s only so much dried blueberry that one person can eat), so you can just dump all those remnant dried foods into the mix.

2. Way healthier! Still, I’m going to try this recipe again with less sweetened condensed milk and fool around with coconut so it’ s not angel flake coconut (which unfortunately has unpronounceable ingredients, too).

3. They taste like cookies.

4. They’re gluten-free! (Although oats are apparently up for debate.)

5. Excellent when crumbled over yogurt for breakfast, or vanilla ice cream with a drizzle of honey for dessert.

6. People are unnecessarily impressed by them.

7. They travel well, on car trips or camping trips or tucked into your lunch.

That’s it! Bon voyage!

J’s family owns a cabin in Canada, where all our boy friends go every year to shoot airsoft guns and eat meats and be manly. This year, they invited the girls. This also meant a lot of very serious questioning, ‘can you eat meat? can you shoot guns? you realize we’ll be shooting guns. and we’ll smell.’

We went anyway. We ate meat. We shot guns. We smelled (pretty).

And we made delicious foods, including my new favorite recipe: Corn Chowder!

Corn chowder is easy peasy, it just takes a long time because you have to chop so much stuff. You can chop the veggies as small or large as you prefer. I chopped my veggies large, mostly because I’m lazy, but also because (as in ice cream) I like my foods chunky.

So chop up: 2 medium sweet onions, 2 medium carrots, 2 stalks celery, 1 red bell pepper, 2 medium potatoes (I chopped these a little bigger, and they sort of melted down as they cooked which added a nice thickness to the soup), 6 ears of corn off the cob (I grilled the corn the day before), and about 3 or 4 strips of cooked bacon chopped into small pieces.

In a large soup pot, melt a little olive oil or butter and add the onion and stir about until the onion is soft, about 8-10 minutes. Then pour in 5 cups of reduced sodium chicken broth (I made my own, but it’s generally easier to buy it), the carrots, celery, pepper, and potatoes, and the leafy bits from 3 de-sprigged twigs of thyme. Allow to simmer until potatoes are soft, about 15-20 minutes. Stir in the corn and 1 cup heavy cream. Simmer uncovered for 10 more minutes, adding pepper and salt to taste.

Here’s also the point where K had a super suggestion. We had a small leftover hot pepper from the night before, which we hoped would add some much needed kick to the chowder. But I didn’t want those super potent hot pepper seeds floating around in my soup, giving shocks to unsuspecting sippers. So I took a fine mesh strainer and put the halved pepper in it, then lowered the strainer in so that the pepper was in the soup, but easy to strain out. That way, we could monitor the spiciness, and remove the pepper when the soup had achieved ideal heat. It took about five minutes, and then we lifted the strainer out with its heated pepper and all the offending seeds.

Finally, you sprinkle in the magic… bippity boppity bacon!

Ta-da!

I made the soup in the early afternoon while the boys were outside making up zombie scenarios for gun games.  We let it cool on the stove then heated it up again about six hours later for dinner. I think the added hours allowed the soup to really mingle its flavors, and I’m convinced that the soup is the better for it. But it was also quite tasty at 2 pm, which would have also been a fine hour for soup, had it not also been such a perfect hour for waterskiing, fish spearing, and painting.

I fell off the blogwagon.

But I am hoping to redeem myself with a new recipe, one culled from S’s and my trip to Costa Rica! We spent a week warming up in Puerto Viejo, a small town on the Southern Caribbean coast, eating as much coconut and fruit as we could stuff into our sunburned bodies.

So here’s my recipe for super delicious coconut enhanced Gallo Pinto, or ‘spotted rooster’, of which there were many in Puerto Viejo, running around on the gravel streets, macking on the lady chickens:

One day ahead of time, pour one and a half cups of white rice into a pot. On the side, stir together a can of light coconut milk and however much water it takes to make three cups of combined coconut milk and water. Add that to the pot.

Heat the rice and coconut milk on the stove until it boils, and then simmer it down until the rice is soft and tasty. Then store the rice until the next day.

On the next day, chop up one small red bell pepper, one medium sized onion, and saute in a pan with a few tablespoons of oil until slightly soft. I added some salt and pepper at this point, too. Then pour in one can of drained black beans, and saute that with the onions and pepper for about two minutes. (Sidenote: all the recipes I read said to also add Salsa Lizano or, if you don’t have that, Worcester Sauce. I did neither and it still turned out tasty.)

Finally, add the three cups of day-old coconut rice and stir until the rice is heated, about five minutes. Stir in some roughly chopped fresh cilantro, and you’ve got Gallo Pinto, Puerto Viejo style!

In Puerto Viejo, our Gallo Pinto was often served with scrambled eggs and white cheese. Once it came with delicious jonny cakes, a recipe I’m still trying to pin down. But Gallo Pinto is also great on its own, especially when washed down with some fresh fruit juice.

I have a few more recipes I want to try from our trip, since the food was so superb. Check back soon (really! I mean it!) for some more tasty things to try.

In the meantime, I’m pondering titles for my recipe book. I was considering the comic book inspired ‘Eat… or DIE!!!’ which is true, if a bit fatalistic. However, the current top title, which lacks the same pizazz but is more cheerful, is: ‘Eat Like Me!’ In any case, all suggestions are most welcome.