Kitchen Zink - Weekly roundup

Is anyone surprised that my plan for a post every day lasted exactly two days before it ended up petering out?  I’m not really.  There’s a line between setting goals for my blog and making utterly unreasonable demands on myself, and saying I’d write here daily sets me well on the other side of the line, moving blogging from occasional respite to dreaded chore.  For some reason I’m preoccupied with defining exactly what I want this blog to be, forgetting that I started it just for the sake of writing every now and then as a sidebar from my very orderly and logical day job.  So, we’re gonna back things down here a little bit, and get back to my original intent.

In the past week or so, while I’ve been thinking things like “I need to write something about these burgers!” we have actually done some pretty cool cooking.  So today’s post is going to be the Cliff’s Notes version of the past week or so, and then the next entry might even be non-food related.  Who knows?  I sure don’t!  In the meantime, here’s what we’ve cooked lately:

Greek-style turkey (chicken) burgers – BHG cookbook (the red checkered one).  This is a recipe we’ve made a few times now, and it’s always awesome.  It’s a fairly simple turkey burger – we used chicken this time – with some presumable Greek spices and seasonings mixed in, cooked up on the handy George Foreman grill.  We picked up some pita pockets this time around, which made for a fun and mildly authentic wrapper for the burgers.  There’s a Greek salsa they have you make, comprised of cucumber, tomato, kalamata olive, and some vinegar and spices.  Put some of that into the pita with the burger, top with crumbled feta (yumm) and presto!  Greek burgers.  I love the way the salty feta and the sour but fresh salsa flavors mix with the lean burger patty.  It’s a great mix of flavors, and it’s going into our repeat repertoire.

Moroccan chickpea and vegetable stew – Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker.  I’ve never had real Moroccan food, made by real Moroccans, but every Moroccan-themed dish I’ve ever made has turned out great.  There’s a distinct set of spices they use, including cumin, cinnamon, paprika and turmeric, that meld into a really phenomenal and unique taste sensation.  Couple that with the fact that there’s usually some dried fruit (raisins, apricots, dates or similar) that add some sweetness to offset the spices, and I just wonder why this cuisine hasn’t taken off in the US.  Anyway, all that said, I thought this recipe was a little bland – maybe it needed a little higher quantity of the spice mixture for the amount of stew it made.  It was fine, I just thought it needed a little more punch.  However, I did accidentally use undrained tomatoes that should have been drained, so maybe it’s my fault things got diluted.  It’s a maybe re-try.

Homemade Mac and Cheese – Made up.  I always loved the restaurant-style macaroni and cheese, like the one you can get at Old Country Buffet or Bonanza.  I’ve also never liked the basic one from the box, made with fluorescent orange cheese powder.  I know you can buy boxes of the deluxe one, but it’s been an ongoing process to try to recreate it on our own.  We’ve had pretty good success using Velveeta, but wanted to try “real” cheese for once.  I did the whole process, making a roux of flour and butter, adding milk to make a white sauce, and then adding shredded cheese once it thickens.  Unfortunately, the Colby we used turned really gritty and grainy in the sauce, much like every other non-Velveeta attempt.  It may be time to bite the bullet and just stick with Velveeta, even though it is something like $5 a box.  It was interesting to find out, though, that Velveeta is made of real cheese rather than the horrible chemical concoction I was envisioning, so maybe it’s not so bad to just use it.

Avocado Frozen Yogurt – Fine Cooking magazine, Feb/Mar 2010.  We own an ice cream maker, and have made pretty good use of it, primarily following the recipes provided in the manual.  That’s slowed down a bit since it is winter right now, but I’d been itching to make some ice cream anyway when the last Fine Cooking showed up.  They had a feature on avocados (very good for you) and one of the recipes was for a frozen yogurt, which we just had to try.  This one was quite a bit more complicated than the ones Cuisinart came up with, and right in the middle of the process I discovered our avocados had gotten too old and were total mush.  So I had to: measure all ingredients and get ready, open avocados, throw avocados away, run to the store for more avocados, heat milk and sugar to boiling, add eggs, stirring constantly so they didn’t curdle, cook to a custard, mix in avocado, add lemon and lime juice and zest, cool in ice bath, pour into machine and run for half an hour to make ice cream.

A mere two hours after I started, we had avocado frozen yogurt!  :)  It was awesome, actually.  The avocado didn’t add a ton of flavor, but really made the ice cream smooth and creamy.  The lemon and lime flavors came through pretty strongly, giving it a very refreshing taste.  You probably wouldn’t want to eat a lot of it in one sitting, but as a light dessert, it was awesome.  It was a ton of work, for sure, but that doesn’t bother me when the end result is really good.  If it had been gross, I would have been ticked that it took me hours to make, but this way it was just a lot of fun.

The funny thing is, I’m not even all the way caught up with the past week’s notable meals yet.  There are two that I really liked, perhaps even more than the ones I’ve written about, but they have a common thread that lends itself to its own post sometime.  I will plan to write that on Wednesday of this week and have it posted Thursday at noon.  (Just kidding!)  Maybe it will happen, maybe not.  I’m not going to force myself and I’m not going to stress if it doesn’t happen.  That’s the plan… for now at least.