Hash brown egg casserole

With bacon and onions! It's kind of like a Spanish omelette but with hash browns (homemade!) and sriracha.

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: 

Chipotle pork tacos

Hey, I remember this blog! I've got a LOT of pictures of food that I can post. So I think I'll try and do that, and maybe someone will think it's cool. 

I got a new phone with a crappy camera, so the photos will suck more. I'm working on getting a new digital camera. 

I also have a new blog: All Things Wordy. Check it out if you like words.

This is a chipotle pork taco with pickled red onions, cabbage and sour cream. 

The pork was a leftover crockpot tenderloin, shredded and sauteed with chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. 

Pickled red onions are really easy and delicious. Just slice some onions, put them in the fridge with some red wine vinegar and water. They only need to "pickle" for ten minutes before they taste delicious.

Actually, all of it was delicious.

Gumbo in the new house

Buying a house is stressful. Finally on the other side of it, I cooked a big ol' pot of my Momma's and my Maw-Maw's Cajun gumbo. And a big heaping pile of "the best potato salad you'll ever taste" (Mom). Here's the prep:

Molly Preps Gumbo: Experimental Cookery Stop Motion from Molly O on Vimeo.

I had to stop stopmotioning because I needed to videochat with my Mom while I was making the roux because it's scary and hard. I didn't take any pictures of the finished product because I had some girlfriends over, but believe you me it was delicious.

And I had it again for lunch the next day.

Gadgets R Great - and me hatin' on Rachael Ray

Hey, food eaters. I know it's been awhile, but here I am. Even though I haven't been in the foodblog circuit lately, I've still been eating on a regular basis -- and that means cooking! I've got lots of photos and videos that need to be posted, so forgive me that we'll be mucking around in the past for a little while. To start, here's something actually pretty recent!!

A couple of weeks ago, I made a mushy dip from some delicious stuff: yam, yellow onion, yellow curry, cumin seed, black beans, lemon juice and waterchestnuts. Once it was all cooked through, I whipped it all up in my trusty Magic Bullet to make a paste. I ate it with tortilla chips, but I'd imagine it would be awesome on pita or fancy crackers. It was SO GOOD -- a dip you don't have to feel bad about pigging out on because it's all vegetables!

This is a video of me talking about how much I love my citrus juicer, with the crazy yam dip featured in it.

Citrus Juicer v. Rachael Ray: Experimental Cookery miniVideoBlog from Molly O on Vimeo.

I found another video from when I first heard Rachael Ray say she didn't like kitchen gadgets = a long time ago. My husband Nate (who in this video I refer to as my fiancé) holds the camera while I talk about garlic gadgets:

Gadgets R Great ep.1: Garlic Tools -- Experimental Cookery miniVideoBlog from Molly O on Vimeo.

The point of all this bad video blogging -- (How awkward can I be?! Yeah, let's record it on video and post it on the internet so the whole world can see. Great idea!) -- is that I love kitchen gadgets! Since I've started cooking and started blogging about it, my parents have really gone out of their way to make sure I get the top of the line in kitchen gadgets every Christmas. This year I got a ball whisk!! You know how when you're whisking in a bowl and only the very top of the whisk touches the bottom? This whisk stills whisks but actually touches the bottom of the bowl. Mixes much better.


Now why would I waste my time with an inferior whisk when I have this bad boy? My other favorite specialty gadget is the Microplane -- the KATANA OF THE KITCHEN. I use it for nutmeg, cinnamon, chunks of parmesan cheese. I also sleep with it under my pillow.


Gadgets R Great. I'm not talking LETTUCE KNIVES or anything ridiculous like that. I'm with Rachael Ray on that one -- just use a freaking real knife, weirdo. But there are some gadgets that are just exactly perfect for the task you need to do. It's in any good cook's best interest to have a small arsenal of tools so that you can conquer any food that may be on sale when you go to the grocery store and have the afternoon to experiment.

In a related thought, I have a pretty decent apron collection that I'll have to share sometime in the future. I wear aprons purely for practical reasons, but I do color coordinate them to what I'm wearing. Maybe it's the narcissistic cooking blog, maybe it's that I'm just naturally really domestic and like looking like a 50s housewife -- but it's probably that I'm really messy.

... I also kept this video of Nate's mouth burning from eating a whole garlic clove. Enjoy!

Nate Bites It: Full Clove of Garlic -- Experimental Cookery Outtake from Molly O on Vimeo.