Shiny Cooking

“Naw, I don’t need anything,” I said.

Linda and I were in Panini’s Deli, a sandwich shop right in the middle of the Discount Health Foods store. I’d link you but, you know, they’re too cool to have a website. We were eating the best sandwiches you can find in this godforsaken restaurant desert of a town, but that doesn’t do them justice. These sandwiches are the bomb, made with fresh, semi-trendy ingredients like red pepper alioli or basil pesto mayo, with several vegetarian sandwiches that — surprise! — aren’t all variations of “avocado, tomato and bean sprouts.” continue reading…

Things are a bit out of sorts here at Casa Shiny Cooking. There’s been computer disaster, a late, somewhat lackluster garden, repetitive cooking, and a heat wave.

Through it all I’ve been documenting dishes with my trusty little Canon A75: continue reading…

Greetings and hello from the lovely planet Venus, where it’s cloudy and rains all the time. For our purposes, Venus is also known as Michigan.

For this month’s Foodbuzz 24×24 event, I hosted a Game Night — that’s with a capital G and N — and made oodles of easy-on-the-expensive-games snacks. I’m here to show you just how easy it is to have people over and serve amazing finger foods like tropical trail mix (above), asparagus frittata bites, blueberry-vanilla goat cheese on polenta dolce, cantonese roasted vegetables, and much, much more!

Err…just try not to make these foods all at once. These dishes dirtied themselves for your benefit in testing all the recipes out. I wouldn’t recommending doing this all at once!

At the end of this post you’re also getting the easiest recipe of them all: tropical trail mix. continue reading…

Holidays aren’t big on this blog. You won’t see me doing a week of Easter recipes, mainly because I can’t be arsed to make dishes beforehand. However, I’d like to put in a word for today’s secular holiday, Earth Day.

Nearly 20 years ago, I took a biology class. It was an introductory course, so we looked at everything from cellular reproduction to continent-wide habitats. One topic that loomed large was climate change. We saw the papers and the data. Even back then, it was undeniable that since the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere has been rising exponentially.

For Earth Day, we split into groups to do a presentation project of our own choosing on the environment. No matter what topic the group chose, climate change affected it in some way — one group looked into rainforest destruction, another into the impact of melting polar ice on arctic flora and fauna. Our group looked at the unique lemurs of Madagascar; one part of that was their changing habitat.

That’s why it saddens and frustrates me to see the willful ignorance and often outright lying on the part of climate change deniers. Even 20 years ago, it was clear that something was going on. continue reading…

Sugar beets are a communal crop. It’s rare for one farmer to have both the specialized harvesting equipment and the manpower required to harvest all of his sugar beets by himself. It’s also a busy crop: as the beets are pulled from the ground by the mechanical harvester they are dumped into a truck driven alongside it in the field, and they need to be driven to the sugar plant ASAP. As a result, several farmers work together in the fall to get everyone’s sugar beet crop in on time. continue reading…

Morning tea in a retro mug. My grandfather sold Funk’s seed and I’d guess the mug’s about 40 years old. Filled with Earl Grey from a health food store in Frankenmuth that disconcertingly advertises “ear candles” quite loudly on its sign.

The tea is good, though.

Ever run into a recipe that is so easy and so tasty that you are dazed under its spell, obeying its command to make it again, and again, and again, until two weeks later you blink and say to yourself, “Damn, that was good.”

This recipe is why I bought the big honkin’ bottle of sesame oil.

Perfect for chlily nights when you have some time to cook, but not a lot of time, this sesame-peanut stir fry puts together pantry and freezer ingredients in about half an hour to create a comforting sweet-and-spicy assortment of veggies and rice. I love it for its…well, its heft. Vegetables and rice are so very light that they threaten to float away without something to anchor them down, and in winter that something is chunky peanut butter and luscious, dark sesame oil, anchored by onion, ginger, garlic, and lots of black pepper.

For a truly comforting experience, mix the rice right into the finished stir fry. We’re all at home here. If it’s late, we’re going to scoop some of this into a bowl and curl up on the couch with it, furtively, because we know we’re not supposed to.

And if we’re lucky, we have Babylon 5 in the DVD player, and it’s a Londo episode, with lots of Vir, because who knew Flounder could act?

Sesame Peanut Stir Fry

Recipe inspired by “Szechuan-style lo mein stir fry with broccoli slaw and peanuts” from The PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) Vegetarian Cookbook: 240 Healthy and Easy No-Prep Recipes for Busy Cooks. I’ll often make this with a bag of mixed frozen vegetables — broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. It’s great with basmati rice and the great part is, you can start the rice when you start cooking the stir fry, and they’ll both be done around the same time. P.S. Sesame peanut stir fry doubles easily to feed a crowd or have extra leftovers.

1 tablespoon canola oil
½ cup chopped onion
1-2 minced garlic cloves
¼ tsp black pepper
16-ounce frozen broccoli, thawed
⅓ cup water
⅓ cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
½ teaspoon ground ginger or 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
½ tablespoon sugar
1 package (approximately 14 ounces) firm or extra-firm tofu, drained and cubed
2 tablespoon chunky peanut butter
1 tablespoon toasted (dark) sesame seed oil
¼ cup unsalted chopped peanuts
cooked rice (I like basmati)

In large skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add chopped onion and cook until softened, 3 minutes. Add garlic and black pepper and cook 1 minute.

Increase heat to medium-high and add broccoli. Cook, stirring occasionally, until warmed, 1 to 3 minutes.

Stir in water, soy sauce, ginger and sugar. Add cubed tofu, if using. Bring to a simmer.

Reduce heat to low and add peanut butter and sesame seed oil, stirring to incorporate; cook until heated through.

Serve on basmati rice. Sprinkle chopped peanuts on top.

Do you ever read something, get entirely the wrong impression, and walk around carrying that impression, like a treasured memento or a nursed wound, for ages before realizing you were mistaken? continue reading…

What happens when you squeeze fit all the leftover pancakes into one Ziploc container? You get branded pancakes, that’s what, in two senses of the word. Other than the branding, they’re pretty neat orange cloud pancakes from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cookbook, aka The One I Yap About All The Time. I’d write it up, but, you know, I accidentally made them without the butter. I wouldn’t want to deprive you of a description of the butter-ful version of the pancakes, you know.

Why are things so slow here lately on Shiny Cooking? Well, server and server-moving problems keep annoying me and making me want to stay away. I know, I should just fix them, right? Also, taking pictures in winter is a pain. And on top of all that, I’m working on more immediate payoffs so I can pay for the tooth I’m getting in March.

You heard me. To pay for my new tooth. Yes. I am officially now a hillbilly. Sigh. Anyone got a banjo for me?

On the bright side, my favorite new recipe basically begins with, “First, open a bag of Fritos,” and ends up being pretty healthy in the end. It’s win-win!

I think I just ate the last of these. And boy, do I miss them already.

Some cookies are destined to the holiday ghetto: unique and lovely, yet irretrivably intertwined with Christmas. Cookies like Mexican wedding cakes, or rum balls, or nut cups only make an appearance in December.

These chocolate sandwich cookies with peppermint filling are different. Grandma D. made them every year for Christmas, but their warm chocolate and fresh mint flavors work anytime. They’re made from an easy-to-work-with rich chocolate dough, rolled out and cut out and baked, and then paired to sandwich a peppermint-flavored buttercream frosting filling. continue reading…