Oregano and Garlic Chicken

Involving relatively little preparation time, this dish featuring root vegetables is an easy way to warm up on a chilly evening.

Ingredients:

1 whole organic chicken
1 tablespoon grass-fed butter
3 tablespoons organic canola oil
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
3 medium white potatoes
3 large carrots
1 large sweet potato

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 and cover the bottom of a heavy baking pan with oil. Rub butter on the surface of the chicken and place it in the pan.
2. Sprinkle red pepper and oregano over the chicken.
3. Dice the garlic, and peel and chop the root vegetables into medium sized pieces. Orange these in the pan around the chicken.
4. Put the pan in the over for about 90 minutes, checking occasionally. The chicken is done when you cut into it and see clear juice. You don't want to undercook it, but you also don't want it to dry out. Baste with water if the chicken seems done but the vegetables aren't soft enough.

7 Foods to Have on Hand in a Storm

A shopping list is an important thing to have in any weather. It saves you money, because if you stick to your list, you don't go for impulse buys of eight jars of pickles that you'll never use just because they were on sale, but it also saves you time if you know exactly what you want. For us compulsive label readers, grocery shopping is time consuming enough without going in totally blind.

But just before a storm is coming, as many of us were reminded this past weekend, a grocery store- never a particularly fun place to be- suddenly turns into a den of panic that feeds off its own fright. Long lines, aisles gridlocked with shopping carts, it isn't a pretty sight. If you absolutely must find yourself in this situation, you want to get in and get out as quickly as possible. Here's a list of all the things you need to sneak through the express checkout lane and move on with your life. I'm going to skip the bottled water and flashlight batteries and get right to the fun stuff.

7) Lentils. If you think you don't like lentils, gamble the $1.99 for a bag and give them another try. If one incarnation doesn't do it for you, there are endless other possibilities. They're pretty good at taking on the flavor of what they're cooked with, so as long as you have your favorite spices on hand, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to find a way to make them delicious. My current favorite is lentil sloppy joes. Plus, they have a shelf life of roughly a century, so they're optimal when you're going into survival mode.

6) Rice. Remember last week when I talked up Lundberg Rice? Put this, or any other grain of your choice, together with some lentils and a different spice or sauce every night and you've got about six non-perishable meals for a dollar each.

5) Onions. I just like onions. They're my go-to vegetable for just about everything. You can use them to add flavor to tomato sauce, salad, home fries, or mix them up with the aforementioned lentils and rice.

4) Unrefined Coconut Oil. Coconut oil gives what you're cooking a subtle hint of summeriness, and who doesn't need that when hunkering down during a blizzard? More importantly, it doesn't need to be refrigerated like butter does, and it can be used for cooking or baking. Two for one.

3) Bread. OK maybe this is an obvious one, but if you're going to be stuck with only one kind of bread for as long as it takes to shovel out the eight foot snowbank that used to be your car, you'd better choose wisely. And you want to do it before you get to the bread aisle, 'cuz you can bet that's going to be a particularly crowded one. You'll want a bread that's versatile enough to work for breakfast as French toast, but also to be a bun on your lentil sloppy joes, and has dunkability if you opt to make soup with your lentils, onions, rice and whatever else is around the house. You've got your bag of vegetable scraps in the freezer to make broth with, right?

2) Eggs. Eggs bridge the gap between breakfast and dinner. You can make up an omelette or French toast, sure, but you can also mix them up with some chopped vegetables for egg fried rice, make egg salad sandwiches, or, of course, use them in baking!

1) Maple Syrup. Again I'm going for versatility here. A must at breakfast time, maple syrup can also be used as a substitute sweetener in other aspects of cooking and baking. Or put the snow to good use and make taffy.

What else helped you get through the storm? What do wish you had had that you'll make sure to grab next time?

Brand Review: Lundberg Family Farms

I'm always looking for a tasty way to minimize my intake of simple carbs. Who isn't? Brown rice is a good way to sneak a whole grain into a meal, and a great brand I recently discovered (thanks to roommates past leaving stuff in the freezer) is Lundberg Family Farms.

In addition to the usual recipes and nutrition facts found on the bag, Lundberg rice also boasts verification from the Non-GMO project, and that it's made using 100% renewable wind energy! Crazy, right?

A trip over to their website assures that, in the 76 years that the company has been family owned, it has always used farming methods that ensure the sustainability of the harvest, and the health of the soil.

Check out their website for the full collection of gluten-free foods they offer, including rice cakes in some fun flavors that make a healthy snack with a long shelf life.

Is Quinoa Not Cool Anymore?

Quionoa is awesome. It's a complete protein that's vegan. It's easier to cook than rice, and it's healthier. You can eat it hot in stuffed squash or cold in a salad. It'll keep on the shelf in your pantry for months and be there when you need it to round out a meal. And you still get to feel like part of the in crown on occasion when you serve it to someone for the first time and teach them how to pronounce it properly.

In short, quinoa is the new soy.

Remember how all of a sudden a few years ago, we started reading everywhere about how maybe soy isn't so healthy after all, and most of it is genetically modified, and it's second only to corn on the grown-in-a-way-that-makes-absolutely-no-sense-and-is-slowly-destroying-the-land scale?

Yeah, quinoa's time has come too, apparently. I guess it's true that if something seems too good to be true it usually is. A recent article in The Guardian went and burst everybody's bubble when it declared that the rising demand for quinoa in first world countries has bumped prices up to the point where people in quinoa's native South America can't afford to eat it anymore, and they're opting for less expensive meal choices, like fast food.

Which would be bad enough if irrefutably true, but, like most things that are important, it's much more complicated than it seems at first, and the truth lies under a big pile of oversimplifications, exaggerations, misunderstandings, and facts that have been stretched to make a point. In the two weeks since the Guardian article came out there has been a flurry of criticism for it. According to Slate, there's no way rising export prices could be a bad thing for growers, and the Guardian article was blowing everything out of proportion. Other sources are saying that, while the short-term economic repercussions might not be great, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, and certainly there's a way to make quinoa economically sustainable. Although the general verdict seems to be that we first-world consumers are doing what we do best and forgetting to use everything in moderation, and if we're not careful we'll probably kill this golden goose, too; the implication being that we can probably go ahead and add quinoa to that ever-expanding list of things to feel guilty or, at the very least, confused about.

But I have a theory. I don't think quinoa is hurting local economies at all. I think all this bad-news stuff was started by some guy out in California who has been buying quinoa from his local, independent market since before you could get it at Whole Foods, never mind Shaws. He's annoyed that it's starting to go all mainstream, and has started a bunch of rumors to make it uncool again so he can feel counter-culture. I'm not falling for it. Nice try.

Chocolaty Peanut Butter Cookies

Putting a spin on the classic peanut butter cookie, this recipe features Taza Cinnamon Chocolate Mexicano, made right here in Somerville but available at many stores and online. I think the stone-ground texture and the extra kick of cinnamon really add a unique quality.

Ingredients:

- 1 cup pasture-fed butter
- 1 cup peanut butter without hydrogenated vegetable oils.
- 1 cup white cane sugar
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 1/2 cups unbleached flour
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
- 6 ounces dark chocolate, chopped into 1/4 inch squares


Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Cream together butter, peanut butter, and sugars.
3. Beat in eggs.
4. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt.  Stir into batter.
5. Stir in chocolate chunks.
6. Put batter in refrigerator for one hour so it's not too sticky to work with.
7. Roll into 1 inch balls and put on ungreased cookie sheets.  Flatten each ball with a fork, making that "I'm a peanut butter cookie, what are you?" criss-cross shape.
8. Bake for 10 minutes, until golden brown.
9. Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Yields 4 dozen cookies.

Fruit and Walnut Muffins

You have to be careful with muffins. Like so many other pastries, they walk an uncomfortable line between qualifying as "breakfast" and "dessert."  And why is that? You'd never confuse a tuna fish sandwich for breakfast food, (or dessert for that matter) so why does, say, a cinnamon roll count as something that should be able to start your day off right?

I don't know, but it's definitely one more reason to find out what's in your food, whether that means preparing it yourself or being able to have an open discussion with your local baker. While muffins and other pastries can make a great quick breakfast when you're running late, they are not all created equal, and some contain little more than sugar and white flour. In addition to being a poor choice for your health in the long run, these empty calories won't give you the energy you need from the first meal of the day, and will more often that not leave you daydreaming about lunch by 10 AM.

So here's my attempt at a breakfast treat that's high in protein and low in simple carbohydrates.

Ingredients: 

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1/4 cup organic cane sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup organic, unsweetened apple sauce (make sure it doesn't contain citric acid)

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup chopped dried fruit of your choice (I prefer cranberries)

1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375.

2. Grease muffin tins. 

3. Sift together dry ingredients in a large bowl.

4. In a smaller bowl, blend maple syrup, apple sauce, eggs and vanilla until well blended.

5. Dump wet ingredients into the large bowl and stir just until blended. Texture should still be thick.

6. Fold in fruit and nuts until evenly mixed.

7. Fill muffin tins about 1/2 way. Bake for about 20-25 minutes until muffins are golden brown and a tester comes out clean. Set the tins to cool on a rack for a few minutes before gently separating muffins from tin with a knife and popping them out. These will get stale pretty quick, so I recommend leaving a few out at a time and keeping the rest frozen.

Dinners With Friends: Avocado Edition

Here we are a week into the new year, and I'm sure we've all heard our share of the uncomfortable laughter regarding diets and exercise plans that have already failed in the face of time and energy consuming obstacles like work, family, and the fact that Netflix automatically starts the next episode of Breaking Bad 14 seconds after the end of the one you just watched.

So let's focus on a success story for just a minute. When my friend Krisha told me three years ago that she was going vegan, I nodded and smiled the way you might nod and smile at a five-year-old who announces that she is going to ride her pony into outer space.

But she seems to have stuck it out for the long haul, making me glad I didn't have any money riding on it. You can read more about her experiences on her blog, Made From Real Vegans.

A few nights ago, we made dinner together, using a recipe for Superfood Salad from Iowa Girl Eats. 

Featuring black beans, pomegranate seeds, onion, quinoa (we substituted brown rice) and a lemon vinaigrette dressing, this salad has enough different flavors to keep every bite interesting, and enough heartiness to avoid that feeling of eating rabbit food that so often is the trademark of an ill-thought-out vegetarian meal.

The real secret ingredient, however, was the avocado. Avocado is one of those foods whose texture makes me vaguely uncomfortable. It took me forever to even accept the idea of guacamole. So I went into this dinner with the thought, "There's so much else in there, maybe I won't even notice the avocado." To my surprise I ended up thinking it was one of the better parts of the salad, and caught myself trying to grab an extra piece on every forkful.

The great thing about avocado is it's the quintessential "good" fat, with a greasy, hearty taste that can be used as a substitute for cheese or condiments on sandwiches. I hear it's also great as an ingredient in cake frosting! I guess it's a case of learning to use that somewhat creepy greasy texture in a way that makes sense. It's still going to be quite awhile before I just eat a naked avocado.

Shoulda cleaned stove before I took this picture.

So I'm thinking, as a new feature on the blog, I'm going to host a dinner party once a month featuring an ingredient that scares me. Or better yet, an ingredient that scares YOU! So go ahead and admit it in the comments section. Tell me what challenges you want me to take on. Whether it's something you've always hated that you'd like to revisit, or something you're just not sure how to prepare. Bonus points if it's specifically with the intention of accommodating a dietary restriction.