Reminder: Time to Vote!

Just a quick reminder that voting is in full swing for Project Food Blog. You can vote on the left-hand side of the the screen, and on Friday 400 bloggers will be selected to move on to round two. Thanks for voting!

Project Food Blog #1: Ready, Set, Blog!

So, mesdames et messieurs, here we are. Week One of the long-anticipated Project Food Blog contest. The judges have asked us, for this round, to talk about what defines us as a foodblogger. In other words, who the heck am I? Some of you have been around since this blog's humble beginnings in 2007, when I eagerly moved into my first all-alone apartment as a first year law student in Iowa City. You witnessed my excitement at having an opportunity to do my shopping, pick my meals, and create them without any rules in place. The kitchen was, in those years, a refuge for me. It was a place outside of the strict environment of school, where I could make beautiful, sensuous desserts and messy, spectacular failures without anyone but you, the sympathetic online audience, to judge me.


Others of you are new, here by way of Foodbuzz, and so I believe a proper introduction is in place. My name is Judith. I am 25 years old, and I live in Baltimore, Maryland. I have a busy, hectic life as an administrative assistant for a small non-profit in Washington, DC. Every day I spend about 13 hours working and commuting by train to and from work, so my blog is in a state of transition right now as I learn how to cook in a constantly stressed, barely-there-budget environment. In a way, this contest is a great time for a blog rebirth. I'm not here to impress you with flashy photography (can't afford the camera!) or a gorgeous layout (can't afford Photoshop!) But what I do offer is a blog that comes from the heart. Food and writing are my passions. The other day I admitted to a friend "you know what? I don't think I actually like to cook that much. I like to eat." So this is my space to express a means to an end, and to give other stressed out, overworked and underpaid young people an idea of how to EAT well.

I bring a number of influences to the kitchen. First, I'm a Southerner. Second, I'm a vegetarian. That's right, folks, it's not an oxymoron. I grew up in North Carolina, and spent many years of my childhood and adolescence not eating meat. I went back to vegetarian at age 20, and this Thanksgiving will be the five year mark. I'm also something of a Europhile. I speak French, German, and some Russian and Turkish. I love playing with different cuisines, but northern French cream and butter is where my heart is. When you read my travel diaries, you might wonder what else I did in Europe, other than eat! Those laborious descriptions of every pastry, every cheese plate, were the seeds that ended up blossoming into this blog. It's been a challenge incorporating lactose-intolerance into my cooking, but I'm slowly learning how to be creative in a kitchen where cheese has always been my secret ingredient.

So what you can expect in this contest, and in this blog as a whole, is a mélange of food, creativity, and challenges coming together. I love to try to make downhome Southern food vegetarian. I love mixing different cuisines. And I love coming up with new ways to address the challenges of dietary restrictions and a limited time and budget. These days, I'm switching over from a mentality of scarcity to one of abundance. I may not make a lot of money in most people's terms, but gosh darnit, I know how to stretch it! I hope you enjoy this journey with me, and of course, remember to vote using the widget on the left hand side of your screen. Voting for this round starts September 20th!

Trader Joe's Quick Breakfast Fix

That raggedy old camera is on me again, but I'm going to go ahead and post this and append the image later because the brilliance of Trader Joe's never fails to astonish me. I love the soy chorizo they sell, which is cheap and very meat-like, but it's really spicy. I mean really spicy. So here's my solution, an original recipe using all Trader Joe's products (and no, I didn't get any compensation for this, I just really like their food):

Vegetarian Breakfast Mash

1 tube Trader Joe's soy chorizo
1/2 jar Trader Joe's eggplant and garlic spread
1 tube Trader Joe's polenta

Mix all the ingredients together well. Microwave until hot. If you want it even less spicy, try adding some frozen corn with butter sauce.

Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream

Well like I said in my last post, I had a few queued up, and then I lost the queued post! So I'm going back a bit in the recipe annals, which is probably good since I recently discovered my lactose intolerance and haven't been cooking as much while I adjust. The recipe for this strawberry ice cream is just the one in the Cuisinart ice cream maker manual. I made it with really great fresh strawberries from the farmer's market, and I think what really makes the taste is that you use lemon juice. I upped the portion of milk to cream and it was still thick and delicious, which proves that with fruit ice cream, it really is mostly just the quality of the fruit!

From the Pantry: Granola Bars

First, apologies for the posting gap! I've been transitioning to a new job and thus a little bit absent, but I'm back now and have a few posts written in advance.

Now, granola bars. I wanted to do a little experiment to see whether I could save money by making my own granola bars as a portable snack during the week. I can't really afford to buy boxed granola bars regularly, and I went to Smitten Kitchen for the recipe that Deb highly recommended. These were very tasty, but more like a dessert bar than anything. I think the problem was that I picked mix ins like butterscotch chips, chocolate chips, and coconut instead of dried fruits or nuts. I did use the optional peanut butter, and I included peanuts as well. I might try this recipe again, but I'd use unsweetened fruit and nuts to try to make the bars firmer and less sweet.

New Blog Tags

Hello, readers!

While I'm waiting for my camera batteries to charge and gearing up for an evening of cooking the bounty I picked up at the farmer's market this morning, I wanted to introduce a few new tags I'll be using on the blog. I normally tag by ingredient, as well as a few other things like special blog features, and you can see all the tags on the left-hand side of your screen. I'll be cleaning the ingredient tags up a bit, but I also will be adding a few things to make the navigation more practical. These are the new tags and what they mean:

make again: recipes that I would make again, not necessarily all my favorites (those are starred in the recipe index), but the ones that I both liked and consider worth the effort required to put in regular rotation

make ahead: recipes that require advanced preparation, usually at least half a day

quick recipes: something you can put together in 15-20 minutes or less total

quick prep: might take a while, but the active cooking time is low; good recipes for folks with low energy or spoons

from the pantry: this is an existing tag, but I wanted to draw your attention to it because this is the tag where budget recipes live

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian Month One: Tomato Bulgur Pilaf with Cinnamon

I've been hesitant to start this feature while my camera battery charger is missing, but I'm hoping that doing a post without a photo will magically cause it to appear. The feature I'm referring to is something that was loosely inspired by the Julie/Julia project, a project which I admittedly had no great love for when it was happening but was inspired by nonetheless. I wanted to do something like that with a cookbook, though I didn't really want to cook an entire book, and I didn't want to cook only from that book for a year. Instead, I decided to do a monthly cooking project, and what better book for this vegetarian blog than Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian?

I've broken the book down into 158 sections. I went mostly with the same level of section headers, though in some cases where a header at that level had an awful lot of content, I used the sub-headers. I left out a few of the vegetable headers that either didn't have a recipe at all or had one recipe and would be almost impossible to find in Baltimore. The goal is to expand my repertoire of simple, standard dishes, not to go wild and crazy. I'll be cooking from at least one section a month, which means that this would take thirteen years to complete if I didn't do any extras, but I will probably do extras. I won't be posting the recipes for copyright reasons, but I will include page numbers, and you can find them all in the hardcover edition of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, available wherever books are sold.

So, month one. I started with an old favorite, bulgur. The Bulgur section is just a few recipes, but I had to go for it first because I've been eating bulgur a lot, and frankly, it's a little tired. I picked out the Tomato Bulgur Pilaf with Cinnamon on page 556, which is actually a variation on Bulgur Pilaf with Vermicelli. One of my favorite things about this book is that it's full of variations, lists, and charts to expand the main recipes. I thought the way the variation was written out could use some work, because it told you what to add but not when or how to add it. Still, I did all right. I didn't use tomato paste or garlic, and I used water instead of stock. It turned out nice and spicy and flavorful. I did think the cinnamon made the flavor quite complex, but I would dial down the red pepper flake next time because the spice overwhelmed the rest of the flavors somewhat.