wakey wakey, eggs and bakey

I'm not a huge fan of sweet breakfasts. I might like the occasional pancake or French toast, but muffins aren't really my thing, and cereal, to me, is more of a snack. I just don't have a massive sweet tooth. My tooth is salty. I have salt-tooth. I have savory teeth.

I LIKE DORITOS!

Ahem.

So, when I have time, I like to make THE BEST BREAKFAST IN THE WORLD, also known as Eggs and Tomatoes. If I've made this for you, it means I really like you. Or perhaps you did something amazing in a past life, like rescuing orphans from a burning building, and you're being rewarded now in this life. What I'm saying is, this stuff is GOOD. Trust me on this ... Iraqis know food. We wrote the first cookbooks. Anyway, I decided to blog this because I've gotten favorable reactions when I've made this for friends (even if they pick the onion out ... you know who you are!), and, after posting a picture of the finished product on my Facebook page, got positive comments on that, too. By the way, it was a bit difficult for me to put down a recipe for this, since there are so many little adjustments you can make to suit your tastes. Read on to see.

OK. To serve one person, you'll need:

• Some cooking oil (I use a tablespoon of vegetable oil)

• 1 small onion, or half a bigger onion, or even half a small onion, depending on how much you like onions (I guess you could leave out the onions entirely if you're not into them, but if that's the case, you should do some soul-searching. Who doesn't like onions? I mean, really.)

• 1 tomato, again using a size that suits *you* (yes, you ... I use a medium-to-large one so I can toss a couple of pieces into my mouth before cooking. I love tomatoes. Like, a lot.) (also, this is a good way to use up soft tomatoes ... you know, it's getting old and you don't really want it in your salad, but it's not going bad so you don't want to throw it out ... that tomato is perfect for this)

• Salt and pepper, to taste (though really, everything in this recipe is "to taste")

• 1 egg, however you like it (I scramble mine, but you can leave yours whole to get a sunny-side egg)
  

(By the way, this can easily be multiplied to feed the masses: on weekends my mom uses a large skillet to make enough for four, and even prepares the eggs differently in the same large pan (scrambled for me, sunny-side up for my brother, etc.))


Start by prepping all of the ingredients: chop and, if you want, salt the tomatoes (but don't drain them, as that increases likelihood of burning, which I discovered this very morning); slice the onion; and do whatever you want with the egg (as you can see, I scrambled mine and seasoned it with salt and pepper).


Now that all the prep work is done, saute the onions in that cooking oil until they're shiny and getting soft. Make sure you really toss them around, so you don't wind up with some burnt bits and some crunchy bits. When the onion is ready, add the tomatoes.



Cook and stir occasionally as the tomatoes cook down. I tend to let them cook down until the peel starts to come off by itself. You can remove it entirely if you'd like (my mom peels them before she even starts cooking), but I don't mind it. Anyway, it'll look like this:


At that point, turn the heat down a bit, pour your egg on top, put a lid on it, and leave it until the egg is cooked through. Don't stir! Feel free to tilt the pan around though, to spread the egg while it's still liquidy. When it's all done, it'll look like this:


At this point, I like to toast some bread, slap on some cheese, and then put some eggs and tomatoes on top to melt the cheese a bit. Then I proceed to shovel it into my mouth as fast as humanly possible. YUM YUM.

And that is how you make the best breakfast ever. Enjoy!

We are going to PUMP [clap] you up!

Guess what, y'all? I joined the Y yesterday! I'm ridiculously excited about this, mostly because they have a pool (actually, they have 2 pools: one for lessons and one for laps). Maybe this summer I'll finally get around to learning how to swim :) That's right people, I don't know how to swim. What can I say? My parents are from Iraq, and who swims in the desert? Not my folks. So it wasn't really an educational priority when I was growing up.

Anyway, in honor of this momentous occasion, I present a healthy, protein-y breakfast, which also happens to be my first recipe blog. Enjoy!

Egg & Salmon Sandwich
makes 1 sandwich
(from Eating Well magazine, July/August 2008)

1/2 tsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 Tbsp finely chopped red onion
2 large egg whites, beaten
Pinch of salt
1/2 tsp capers, rinsed and chopped (optional, which I used, yum yum)
1 oz smoked salmon
1 slice tomato
1 whole-wheat English muffin, split and toasted (I used Arnold Multi-grain Sandwich Thins)


1. Heat oil in a small nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add onion and cook, stirring, until it begins to soften, about 1 minute. Add egg whites, salt and capers (if using) and cook, stirring constantly, until whites are set, about 30 seconds.




2. To make the sandwich, layer the egg whites, smoked salmon and tomato on English muffin.

(yes, there is tomato underneath all that.)

Per serving: 214 calories; 5 g fat (1 g saturated, 2 g mono); 7 mg cholesterol; 25 g carbohydrate; 19 g protein; 3 g fiber; 670 mg sodium; 221 mg potassium. Also a good source of omega-3s.

As a final note, I just want to point out that, while this was tasty, you might want to think twice about eating smoked salmon before heading into the office, depending on how you feel about your coworkers :)

spring cleaning

I'm an awful blogger. 6 months between my first and second posts, and now a two-month gap between the second and third posts? At least that's an improvement. Maybe my next post will be in a month. Do blogs have half-lifes? Anyway, my explanation is a simple one: I didn't have internet. Well, I *kind of* had internet, in the bumming-off-my-neighbors sense, but that stopped working, so I finally sucked it up and am now a paying Time Warner customer.

Moving on, now that we're firmly entrenched in spring, I thought it would be a good time to write about spring cleaning. Don't worry, I won't regale you with stories of buying various cleaners (Lysol wipes suck) and Swiffer wipes (the dry ones rule, though I hate the smell of the wet ones), or put up pictures of my brand new dustpan (it's blue and oh so pretty!). Besides, this is a food-ish blog. So, since I think it's time I go through my recipe binder and start chucking things, I'll regale you with that story.

I actually have a couple of recipe binders. One is filled with recipes I've made and consider successful, and the other is filled with recipes that I have yet to try. Last night I threw a party, and pulled out a "new" recipe (in the sense that I hadn't made it before). It was Jell-O Dirt Cups (or, as I was calling them, Worm Food ... it was a bit of a theme party (and, if you felt bad about not being invited, then maybe now you feel less bad, eh?)). They pretty much looked like this (from the Kraft website ... I was too busy to take my own pictures):

The ingredients are instant chocolate pudding, milk (to turn the powder into pudding), Oreos, Cool Whip and gummy worms. This is NOT the kind of food I make for myself anymore, so the recipe went into the garbage, instead of into the Binder of Success. My friends seemed to like it, so there's the recipe for anyone who wants to make it at home. (My version was slightly different: (a) there was no vanilla pudding; (b) all of the Cool Whip was mixed in with the chocolate pudding; (c) the layers were cookie crumbs, Cool Whip/pudding mixture, more cookie crumbs, and gummy worms; and (d) I didn't try to pretend that the colorful strings of gelatin were "fruit snacks.")

Also not making the cut are Moonbeam Cookies, which even I'm sad to see go. If you make these and take them to work, your coworkers will like you more. I can vouch for this from personal experience. I hope none of my colleagues read this blog, otherwise my office will become a chilly place indeed. (I didn't bother with the drizzle of "candy coating" (I'm assuming they can't call it "white chocolate" for legal reasons) because the first time I tried microwaving it, it scorched and there was smoke pouring out of my microwave.)



Next: Incredible Peach Cobbler. Tasty. I think that my good friends, KC and BJ, will "forget" to send me future invitations for this transgression. It was a big hit the one time I made it, which happened to be for a pot luck party at their place. C'est la vie. By the way, that white stuff on top is straight up sugar.



Pillsbury took a beating on the last two, so the next one offers a reprieve: Bisquick's Cherry Swirl Coffee Cake. I made it so long ago, I don't remember much about it. It's going into the garbage because it's made with "baking mix." This might be totally arbitrary on my part, but I'm keeping the recipes with flour and sugar, salt, baking soda and/or powder, etc. No baking mix. It still looks good, though, don't it:


And, finally, how good is this Black-Bottom Banana Cream Pie? Well, a few years ago I made this for someone's birthday. I bought the wrong kind of pudding (I didn't get the instant kind), and when it wouldn't set, I blamed my friend and her Lactaid milk (sorry, miss B!). I even went so far as to email Kraft to see if Lactaid jacks up instant pudding. Needless to say, the answer was that I was an illiterate jerk. Anyway, I proceeded to assemble per the recipe, and just tossed the whole thing in the freezer (never actually cooking the pudding). AND PEOPLE STILL ATE IT.



Well, tossing out 5 recipes isn't much, but it's a start :) And, if you make any of these, let me know how they turn out for you. Happy baking! Or refrigerating.

everything old is new again (or vice versa)

OK, so this blog was supposed to be my big experiment, an online documentation of my attempt to lose weight by altering my eating habits. Turns out ... it's been proven. Thanks a lot, New York Times, for destroying my blogging aspirations.

But, being such a big fan of Darwin (and evolution in general), I've decided to adapt. Instead of seeing if I can do it, I'm going to assume that I can and will do it. In the meantime, I'll post recipes and pictures of food for my friends (and whatever other poor souls stumble in ... I hope y'all like parenthetical statements and LotR references). Oh, and I guess I'll post links and book reviews and that sort of thing, when relevant.

Why even bother, you ask? Well, I like hearing myself type. Also, I'm always surprised when other people are surprised about the fact that I can cook. First of all, I don't think I'm some culinary wizard. I think that if you can follow Lego directions and put together a little airplane made of plastic bricks, you can follow a recipe. And I follow recipes. I've been living on my own for 2+ years and I'm still not at a level where I'm comfortable with just going to the market, picking up what looks good and tossing it together to create a meal. I need to plan a menu, read a recipe, write down what I need, and then go shopping. Baby steps, though, right?

Secondly, I think that if I can do it, you can do it. In other words, I'm hoping that with enticing pictures and step-by-step instructions (free from grammar and spelling errors, of course), I can encourage others to step away from the TV dinner and eat some real food. I'm not a chef, I've never taken any kind of cooking class, and am not on TV. I'm a regular person with a regular full-time job (saving the world one comma at a time), and yet I can still find the time to get my cooking on. I hope you're interested enough to check back :)

In the meantime, here's a picture of my food smiling at me:

So it begins...

So this is where I stop talking about writing a blog and finally start ... writing! My original intention was for this to be an all-purpose blog, about whatever I feel like writing about (be it feminism, politics, books, etc.). I think that it's mostly going to be a food blog, but with some of that other stuff mixed in. I mean, I defy categorization, so why can't my blog? Anyway, the focus on food stems from Michael Pollan's column in the New York Times ("Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch"). (In the interest of full disclosure, I've read two of his books (The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma), read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and seen the documentaries "Super Size Me" and "Food, Inc." Clearly it was a case of preaching to the converted.) What especially stood out (for me) was this exchange between Mr. Pollan and Harry Balzer, a food-marketing researcher:

"I asked him how, in an ideal world, Americans might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has done to our health. 'Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It's short, and it's simple. Here's my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That's it. Eat anything you want -- just as long as you're willing to cook it yourself.'"

(Read for yourself here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html )

So this is my personal experiment ... is this possible? Can I really live only on things I've made? How basic do my ingredients have to be? Is it cheating if I open a can of chicken stock, instead of tossing leftover chicken bits into hot water to make it myself, or a canister of (Italian-style) bread crumbs instead of hunks of bread tossed into a food processor? How good will all this taste? Can I do this while working full time *and* taking a class (while attempting to hang on to single-girl things like going out to dinner once in a while and not letting my apartment get nasty enough to grow mold)? And finally, will this work as a diet? (I hope to have the answer to this last one sometime before that wedding I'm going to next year.)

Finally, this is only possible because I moved into an apartment with a *real* kitchen (i.e., there's an oven). My last apartment had a minifridge, 2 burners, a microwave balanced precariously on a shelf, and a toaster in the corner. My idea of home-made dinner looked something like this:


Mmmmm, rice in a bag...

Oh yea, and I'm going to attempt to make mostly *healthy* things ... I'm not going to pretend that making a cake from scratch makes it magically good for me :) Also, I don't want anything I make to wind up on here: http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/ (though I think some of the pictures are hilarious).

Thanks for reading, and feel free to leave comments/suggestions!
~Selwa