Thursday, February 25, 2010

Finally, a night off to cook for myself

So I have had a couple of nights off in the past week - Sunday I made red lentils with fried cabbage and caramelized onions (and a bunch of cumin) from one of my new favorite food blogs: http://smittenkitchen.com/2007/02/confessions-of-a-cumin-junkie/

Then I have been working nights since then. Tonight was my first night off at home alone for awhile, and I ended up reading smitten kitchen and then making dinner. A simple salad of red leaf lettuce, blue cheese, walnuts, thinly sliced red onion and apple, with a kozlics bordeaux mustard vinagrette. Roasted spaghetti squash and a basic tomato sauce - one chopped leek and 3 garlic cloves, sauteed for 5-10 minutes in olive oil, then add a can of italian plum tomatoes (whole, crushed by hand), some salt, and simmer for awhile...??? until your desired consistency is reached i suppose. I like my tomato sauces pretty loose, and I love this one because it gives simple, pure, intense tomato flavour. Added a sprinkle of red pepper flakes at the end, after cooking for maybe 45 minutes? In this case I acutally wanted a bit of a thicker sauce - because I was eating it with squash which can be a bit watery itself - so was lucky that the can of tomatoes I used had a thicker juice.
THEN - even though I'm already stuffed (!) I made a mini-apple crisp. Realized late in the process that I don't have rolled oats (what?) so I used wheat bran instead. When I was growing up my mom always made apple crisp with just a brown sugar/butter/flour topping, so the oat thing came later for me anyway. This ended up being delicious! And I'm not always great with fruit crisps - they often turn into fruit soups with a crumble topping. In this case I:

Cut 3 1/2 apples (empire and spartan) into 8ths, then halved/quartered those.
Buttered a SMALL glass baking dish (15x23 cm) and put the apple pieces in, with a ton of cinnamon (didn't realize the shaker-lid thing wasn't on!), a sprinkling of whole wheat flour, pinch of salt and squeeze of lemon juice.
Topped this with 1/3 cup wheat bran, bit less than 1/3 cup whole wheat flour, 1/3 cup brown sugar (unpacked), mixed with ~2 tbsps melted butter. Crumbled a bit of cold butter on top, then baked for about 30 minutes at ~375.

And YUM! I could have maybe cooked it a bit less as I like a bit of bite to my fruit, but the crumble topping is delicious, and the fruit part is neither soggy nor too dry. AND it's just the right amount for 2 servings. Now if only I had ice cream, although I think it's pretty un-necessary.

Also toasted the squash seeds at the same time, which I am now snacking on despite the lack of room in my belly. Good thing I did yoga earlier!

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