But I’m Not a Housewife!
Domestic Bliss, EventuallyArchive for Cooking
Millet For Breakfast
Hey y’all. I’ve got the sniffles, but the end of the semester is almost here! Two more days of teaching and then I get ready to see my family in California. Apparently there was just an earthquake there last night. Yikes! At least it wasn’t worse than that.
I’m starting a new habit of eating millet for breakfast. It’s a great whole grain and so fast and simple. We cook a large batch on Sunday (it’s so easy, just boil like rice) and keep it in a tupperware in the fridge. For breakfast, I just microwave a bowl full and add a little bit of honey, milk, walnuts, and raisins.
For those of you who are gluten free (though I’m not sure I believe that’s necessary) there it is a gluten free whole grain!!!
Recipe: Beet Salad With Kidney Beans and Romaine Lettuce
As promised, here is the recipe for the roasted beet salad that my husband and I ate a couple of times for lunch last week. The beets were based on Mark Bittlman’s recipe, which he shares in a video: Beet Salad With Garlic Walnut Sauce, and in and article: A Divorce for Beets And Goat Cheese .
Bittman’s Recipe:
Time: 1 hour 20 minutes
2 pounds red beets, about 4 large, trimmed of greens
1/4 cup olive oil
6 cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 cup walnuts
2 tablespoons to 1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
Salt and black pepper to taste
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley leaves, for garnish.
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Wash beets well. While still wet, wrap them individually in foil and place on a cookie sheet or roasting pan. Bake beets, undisturbed, for 60 to 90 minutes, until a thin-bladed knife pierces each with little resistance. (They may cook at different rates; remove each one when it is done.)
2. Meanwhile, put oil in a skillet over medium-low heat. When it is warm, add garlic and cook until fragrant and beginning to soften, about 6 minutes. Add walnuts and continue to cook until they begin to color, about another 4 minutes. Let mixture cool slightly and then put it in a small food processor; process until you have a relatively smooth paste. Add orange juice to taste and sprinkle with salt and lots of pepper.
3. After beets have cooled, peel off skins. Slice beets into wedges or cubes and toss with dressing. Taste and adjust seasoning, garnish with parsley and serve.
Yield: 4 servings.
I followed his recipe (without using measurments) until I got to the orange juice part – I had unwittingly drank the last of our orange juice that morning, so I used a splash of white wine vinegar, and some of that fig flavored basalmic vinegar that I used for my Wheat Berry Waldorf Salad the other day. I just kept adding olive oil and the two vinegars until it tasted right and there seemed to be enough of it to cover the beets. Next time I’ll add the walnuts last though, because it turned out a lot more nut-buttery than I would have liked.
Meanwhile, I was also baking sliced whole wheat pitas with olive oil, salt, and garlic powder. These turned out great. They are nice served warm and chewy, or baked until crisp, like the ones you buy at the store.
To assemble the salad, I mixed up a regular vinaigrette in a cup, with a fork (this contains about 2 parts olive oil to 1 part vinegar, in this case white wine vinegar, salt and pepper or cayenne), and tossed it with the chopped romaine lettuce. Then I added a layer each of kidney beans and beet salad. It may sound like a lot of work for a salad, but I kept the beets in a tupperware and we ate it for lunch several times. I must say, I was pretty proud of myself for throwing this together while my husband was napping, and then for having it ready to assemble the next day when he unexpectedly came home for lunch! Go Jess!
Please Allow Me to Improvise
Well pat me on the back and call me a Rockstar, I made a kick-ass breakfast this morning:
My husband has been raving about the merits of wheat berries in the morning and lamenting the fact that I haven’t eaten any of the large Tupperware-full of cooked wheat berries in the fridge. Every morning he has been filling up a large coffee mug full of wheat berries with milk and honey, or with Kefir, and the addition of raisins and walnuts as the mood strikes, to eat in the car on the way to work. The first time he made them, he made way too many (which I think everybody does the first time because they swell up so much) and they weren’t cooked quite enough. And because they weren’t cooked enough, they had too strong of a wheat flavor for me. They were chokingly strong – made my throat clench up!
But, he did a second batch and I’ve been meaning for days to make a Waldorf salad with them – like we used to buy prepared at the New Pioneer Co-op in Iowa City. I was already well into the production of the salad, having chopped an apple, a pear, and a stalk of celery, when I realized that all the raisins and walnuts were gone. Bummed, I Googled some Waldorf salad recipes anyway, to see what to mix with mayonaise for the dressing. Hmm, it seemed I would need either lemon juice or apple cider vinegar, neither of which I had.
This is when I remembered the fancy, fig vinegar I had bought at a gourmet food store once for Tim’s birthday (with a bunch of other stuff, because he loves to cook and try new things, but which he has never used).
One whiff of it and knew that it would have enough sweetness and interesting flavor to make up for the lack of raisins. I whisked some with mayo, in a cup with a fork, tasted it, and was sold.
It may need improvement, but it’s a pretty darn good salad and I’m proud of myself for not giving up in the kitchen. It’s been awhile since I’ve made anything other than fried egg sandwiches and instant oatmeal for breakfast, or any other meal for that matter! I’m so proud of myself, in fact, that I’ve made a new category for my posts: Courage in the Kitchen.
Below is a taste of what’s to come tomorrow: I’m finally gonna post my review of Happy Housewives.
Bon Appetit!
Caramelized Onions and Eggs and Greek Yogurt, Like Heaven
It figures that the day after I sign up for NaBloPoMo, in which bloggers vow to post every day, I would slack off and miss a day. I was on a five day streak, and then yesterday it was soooo beautiful here in Denver, that I spent the day outside with my husband, cooked a lovely supper with him, and then was too tired to remember that I had breakfast pics to post about.
So here they are today, two of my favorite breakfasts:
Fried Eggs With Caramelized Onions
Greek Gods Yogurt With Berries
I read about the caramelized onions with eggs years ago in Suzanne Somers’ first Cookbook Eat Great, Lose Weight. I’m not anti-carb, but sometimes I go on Carb heavy streaks and I feel I need to eat fewer for awhile.
Yesterday, I knew we’d be eating spaghetti for dinner, so I left the toast out of my breakfast. I sauteed an entire red onion in olive oil and fried up two eggs. I used to eat this with sliced tomatoes on the side, but we got a great deal on grape tomatoes at our local market, so I added them to the pan when the onions were almost done and I was just putting the eggs in the pan. They added a sweet tanginess as a contrast to the caramelized onions. Oh my gosh! My favorite breakfast ever!
As for the Greek Gods Yogurt, my husband found it the other day and thought it was so good, he texted me about it from work. That night he was eating it again. When I asked him what it tasted like, he said, “Like heaven!” And we laughed and laughed because it sounded so cheesy. But it is true! This yogurt is amazing! It’s not exactly low in fat, but if you eat it instead of ice cream, it’s a very healthy dessert. You could easily serve it on a graham cracker crusts with berries and pass it off to guest as alow-fat cheesecake.
Casey snuck into the yogurt photos. He follows me wherever I go!
