at long last

It's been a while, I know, but I have a good excuse. I was on the academic job market last fall, and it was crazy busy. But don't worry, I made time to eat. My goal was to cook simple meals and not rely on pre-packaged garbage or take out, and I was mostly successful. Last night, I scrolled through the pictures on my phone and found these highlights:

Apparently, I made fried egg sandwiches one day. I believe that the biscuit recipe is from the Smitten Kitchen, but I'm not very good at biscuit making so I didn't do them justice. 

I also made a red lentil and broccoli curry, from Veganomican. The original recipe calls for cauliflower, but I'm not a fan, hence the broccoli.

I also made fettuccine and meatballs. The sauce is a butter-roasted tomato sauce from Bon Appetit, and so is the meatball recipe. I made the fettuccine (my reward after returning from a campus interview--fresh pasta is the best!) from Food 52's feature on Mario Batali. 

Let's see, what else? I was on a veggie burger kick and made these beet burgers, from the Post Punk Kitchen. They were super good, but messy to make. I shredded the beets in the food processor and I got beet juice everywhere--the counters and floor--and the kitchen looked like a crime scene.

I also made a butternut squash and cheddar galette, from A Year of Pies.

I was able to make some time for baking, beginning with pumpkin whoopie pies, from either Baked: New Frontiers in Baking or Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Revisited. 

For Christmas, I made Funfetti cookies.

And chocolate peppermint cookies from Baked Elements: The Importance of Being Baked in 10 Favorite Ingredients. 

 And rugelach from Baking Out Loud: Fun Desserts with Big Flavors.

I know I cooked other stuff last fall, and the lack of photographic evidence doesn't mean it didn't taste good enough to share. It just means that I was too hungry and impatient to take a few seconds and document it. 

olive lentil burgers

I'm moving in a couple of weeks, and I'm trying to use up the food in the kitchen. Even though I'm not moving very far (it's only about a 5 minute walk from my current place), I'll be sharing kitchen space with a roommate now (a friend from my program), and I don't want to take it all up. 

So, these olive lentil burgers were a great opportunity to use up the kalamata olives, lentils, and panko that were hanging around. The recipe was from Post Punk Kitchen, a vegan website, but as these were baking up, all I could think was "oooh, these would be so good with swiss cheese." I don't think that's what they had in mind, but I was right.

My garden has been steadily producing tomatoes lately, so I made tomato jam over the weekend. On it's own, it's a bit too sweet for me (I think Drew would think it's perfect though), but fortunately you're not supposed to eat it on its own, and it was perfect on this burger. Tomato jam tasted like ketchup, except infinitely better. 

veggie burgers

We made veggie burgers the other day, using this recipe from the LA Times. The base is pureed black beans, which is then mixed with a homemade pico de gallo, sauteed mushrooms and onions, and panko. 

We usually don't make homemade veggie burgers because 1) they turn out to be too dry, or 2) the mixture is too crumbly and is therefore difficult to shape into burgers. But on occasion, for some reason, we decide to give homemade veggie burgers a go, and I'm glad we did this time. These burgers did not suffer from the above 2 problems.

I am compelled to point out that I grew the arugula we used to top our veggie burgers.