Sunday freezer cooking

Coconut red curry chicken with spinach and cilantro

Chicken Alfredo with spinach and broccoli

Cilantro lime chicken with corn and black beans

Black bean taco soup

Cooking in Europe on a bike (sort of)

I will have a very unique cooking challenge on my plate (GET IT?) in just a month: I'll be traveling for three weeks from Milan to Gothenberg, cooking for five adults and a baby with naught more than a camping stove. My sister Haley and her husband Rob are going to be biking that route with their friends Jonas and Louis. I will be in the car with their baby!

In preparation, I've started learning vegetable names in German. (I'm a wordnerd; have you seen my other blog?) Here are the cutest:

• der Kohl (cabbage, like "coleslaw"
• der Blumenkohl (cauliflower, lit. flower cabbage)
• der Rosenkohl (brussel sprouts, lit. rose cabbages)
• der Broccoli (I'll give you one guess.) 

And I purchased a new camera! This little point-and-shoot guy will be in my pocket capturing the grocery stores, farmers' markets, and restaurants on the adventure -- as well as a lot of shots of one cute kid, my nephew August.

You can expect some videos to be posted from the trip, as well as maybe some fancy videos to be posted after (have you seen this? Rob made it).

Is it weird that I'm really excited to have a decent camera again because I want to take pictures of food? This blog will get a whole lot prettier in just a week or so when it arrives. I've been making do with the craptacular camera on my dinky QWERTYslide middleschooler's phone. Now that the trip to Europe is actually happening, I'm regretting having only gotten 16GB of memory because it was on sale... I really should have sprung for this one: Transcend 32GB Class 4 microSDHC Flash Memory Card - TS32GUSDHC4.)

In the meantime, here is a crappy photo of some delicious chicken cabbage tacos I made last week. Chicken and onion, carrots, cucumber, and cilantro wrapped up in cabbage leaves with a red curry peanut butter sauce. 

Don't waste it!

I've been really into NOT THROWING ANY FOOD AWAY EVER. And two really great things have come of this: homemade broth, and (TMI) I'm really regular. More on that in a minute.

So all that stuff you usually throw away -- broccoli stalks; the thick ends of asparagus; the stems and edges of bell peppers, onions, carrots; the stems and stalks from kale and cilantro and dill and parsley; the outside leaves of lettuce and cabbage; the slimy spinach at the bottom of the bag -- all that is good stuff!! To assuage my guilt at throwing away perfectly edible food that I had paid good money for, I used to made pickled broccoli medallions (ehhh), but I've recently realized two greater ends for these means. 

1. Homemade broth! 

Seen below is my homemade broth. It's reddish because I usually cheat a little with bouillon cube and Sazon Goya, but it's made of all the ends of stuff that I put in a bag and freeze until there's enough to make a pot of broth. You can of course make this vegetarian, but if you're good with your timing and you've got, say, the picked over leftover bones from an emergency grocery-store rotisserie chicken -- that there would be dee-licious too. 

2. Green ice cubes!

(This is the TMI part) -- If you're a shake person like me, green ice cubes are the perfect use for all those extra bits -- EXCEPT ONIONS, believe me. Leave out the onion bits for green ice cubes. But talk about a serious way to get extra nutrients and stay regular, especially if you're into Brassica oleracea -- that is broccoli, kale, califlower. They're all the same species, and they all make you gassy. The good spin on it is that if you're ever not regular and you wanna fix that, juice away and take a fresh shot. Guaranteed that by morning you'll be feeling right as rain and totally empty. 

So because I usually store up a bunch of ends and bits until I have enough that makes it worth my time to get out the juicer, I bought a couple of extra ice cube trays so I can make green ice cubes with all the juice. They're not always green -- one time we just had too many carrots by accident so I juiced the ones that were on their way out, so the cubes were actually orange. 

I also have one more spare ice cube tray that I use for all little bit of coffee at the bottom of the pot every morning. Those coffee ice cubes are great in coffee, Bailey's, ice cream, and morning shakes depending on the flavor (peanut butter banana chocolate coffee shake, anyone?). 


With all this beautiful smashed up vegetable pulp, one of my goals for this summer is to get on board with composting. 


Ps, will someone please buy me this Cooking With Calphalon 9-Pc. Utensil Set?? kthx. Also this: 

Butter Update - Mac&Chz

Yes, I cook real food a lot, but, yes, I often eat mac&chz when it's time for me to go to the grocery store but haven't. I just wanted to let the world know that the garlic cilantro butter that I made last week is really good in mac&chz!!

Garlic Cilantro Butter + Asparagus Chicken Roll-Ups

This is me at the end of my latest culinary journey, enjoying a glass of wine with a very rich, delicious meal.

It all started with butter. I stood in the grocery store flipping through cooking magazines looking for pretty pictures to adulterate. Then: the colors grabbed me. A rich, rosy orange; a creamy white speckled with a deep green. Baked salmon with a herb-infused yogurt sauce. Yum... I think?

Somehow the wires crossed in my brain to the extra butter we had at my house -- both my roommate and I bought some the same day -- and one of my favorite flavors, cilantro -- which my roommate hates. Weirdo! (I know quite a few people who don't like cilantro; they say it tastes like soap. I have to admit I love the taste of soap bubbles...)

I wanted to try it two different ways: with regular, store-bought butter and with homemade whipped butter. To whip your own butter, you just get some heavy whipping cream, whip it up with a mixer until it's whipped cream -- then keep whipping until it's butter. With the regular butter, it's best to leave it out until it's room temperature before the mixing.


Then I chopped up some cilantro and used my garlic press for some fresh garlic smooshies. Just mix it in!

Now, the whipped butter won't be the same consistency as real butter so I packaged these products differently. With the real butter, I rolled it up in some wax paper and stuck it back in the fridge. Once it cools off again, it'll harden up and you can take the wax paper off for a nice roll to keep in your butter dish.

I also used these two different butters very differently. The whipped butter was a delicious and light topping for Triscuits or fancy bread or something. Here's a little product placement from last Friday's ANGRY BAKING night:

The real butter was obviously too rich to be a topping right on a Triscuit, unless you're really into heart disease. I prefer to use butter when cooking so I check out what was in my fridge the next day landed on some chicken and asparagus.

I'm really into putting good food inside other food -- which is why I have a small obsession with crescent rolls. I wanted to have chicken breasts with asparagus rolled up in them -- but once I started cooking, I realized I didn't have chicken breasts, I had chicken tenderloins. What? If you're in the mood for chicken fingers, why would you cook them at home instead of just going to whatever family restaurant is closest to you?

Anyway, I took these already tiny tenderloins and pounded 'em flat and even so that I could actually fit asparagus in them. While pounding, I broke apart the asparagus and sauteed it up in some of the cilantro garlic butter. The magic of the garlic butter is that 1. I didn't have to messy my hands with garlic and 2. the kitchen instantly smelled soooooo good. Buttery and garlicy and cilantroey mmmmm.
In the MiniVideoBlog in the previous post, I talk about the genius of fresh flavored butter. I think I'll always have a stick of garlic butter ready for cooking.


The rolling was fun. It'd have been easier with chicken breasts. A lot of toothpicks later, here are the tiny roll-ups just in the frying pan, seasoned with Tony's, of course.

I let these cook on pretty low heat with a cover.


The result was really rich, seemingly fancy finger food! Here's the beau enjoying. He doesn't look like he is, but he is.

So, here's to butter. I know it's not the healthiest food, but, god, it tastes soooo good. There are a few things I never ever compromise on, even though there are low-fat alternatives: butter, sour cream and mayonnaise. May you allow a little bit of fat into your life.

MiniVideoBlog: Fun with Butter!

Butter! - Experimental Cookery MiniVideoBlog from Molly O on Vimeo.

Hey, food freaks!
What's the one thing that makes everything in your kitchen taste better? That's right! Butter.
(Other acceptable answers: Tabasco, Tony's, basil, garlic. But this post is about butter.)

I bought something cool at the grocery store today, and it set all sorts of ideas buzzing in my head because of a meal I made last week. Here's a quick minivideo of me... talking about butter. = Dorktastic! ... Maybe I shouldn't be posting this on the Internet... I'm looking for a new job.

I'm not going to lie -- I sort of stole this whole idea from my parents and their awesome neighborly holiday presents. They made some sort of seasoned butter for their friends. But intellectual property rights be damned! That's what I love about cooking. Did you know that you can't copyright an ingredient list? You can only copyright the actual 'how-to' text part of the recipe. Don't know how I know that.

Brainstorm time! Other flavor variations to try:

• brown sugar/cinnamon
• red curry!
• basil/pesto
  

Get ready for another exciting recipe! Coming soon. haha.