Straight from the SmugMug kitchen

Asiany lettuce wraps are usually something you see with meat on menus. But about a year ago, I had a box of these Morningstar veggie burgers lurking in my fridge, and a head of butter lettuce that needed eating. Add some sriracha, and voila, lettuce wraps for two. They’ve become a lazy-night staple we eat every couple of months. And since then, I’ve used lettuce to wrap up all sorts of leftover tofu and veggies when I’m just feeding myself. It makes a nice break from the box of salad with work leftovers dumped on top that I often eat. Man, I know how to make food sound appealing!

Since I enjoy the concept of lettuce wraps so much, I decided to make some kung pau tofu and wrap it up in lettuce for a fancier work version:

Kung pao tofu lettuce wraps

The soft lettuce, crunchy nuts, sweet-salty complex sauce, chewy tofu. Wow. I could eat them every day.

Try wrapping asiany leftovers in lettuce leaves, you won’t be sorry.

And also, I love cooking.

I just celebrated my birthday, and Thanksgiving is coming up in a couple of days. I’m feeling grateful. I get to cook stuff like this every day:

Portabello mushroom caps waiting to be roasted and filled with barley-artichoke heart stuffing

The same day we also had:

Truffled beets with watercress salad and walnut pate toasts

And this too:

Warm celery root and puy lentil salad with mint and hazelnuts next to cool avocado-dill-cucumber-watermelon radish salad

And a little of this:

Warm fava-herb dip with pine nuts

We also had some meat and stuff, but I especially love cooking veggies (since that’s what I eat.)

Thanks for being so awesome, SmugMug. Another happy year has passed. Being 33 is fantastic so far. (Wait until I post about my birthday cakes. I don’t know which was better, the banana with chocolate frosting or the pumpkin with maple cream cheese frosting.)

And they were totally worth it.

I have a couple of pink spots on my hands three weeks later from an attack by the polenta I served this dish over:

Kabocha squash, Jacob's cattle beans and kale in chocolate tomato sauce over polenta

I see why old Italian ladies use deep pots with long wooden spoons to make polenta. One would think I would learn, as this is the worst, but not the first polenta burn.

This recipe got me started on liking mole and chocolate in savory foods. It comes from a cookbook by the chef at a restaurant in Cork, Ireland, which we were supposed to go to this past April (we didn’t get to go to Ireland at all because of the STUPID ICELANDIC VOLCANO! but that’s another story)

His beautiful cookbook, Wild garlic, gooseberries and me is so delightful to read. It’s made up of sections of essays separated by sections of recipes. I feel like I’m tramping through the Irish countryside in rubber boots picking stinging nettles and other tasty goods, breathing the wet, green air. Mmmm Ireland.

If you want to make it, Heidi at 101 Cookbooks made it a while back and posted the recipe. And you really should. A simple list of ingredients but really complex flavor. I mess around with the recipe in other ways too, but I almost always do the lower end of the jalapenos and add in a smoked one – a chipotle soaked and chopped up. I’m a sucker for that smokey flavor.

These grapes have a Facebook page:

Giant effing grapes, look at the size of that thing!

We’ve been eating these huge, delicious grapes at work, labeled ‘holiday grapes’ at the grocery store. We’ve had them raw and roasted in a salad and roasted with chicken. I went to post about them and in my research-Google, the first link was to their Facebook page.

Grapes, with a Facebook page. And what does it say about me that I briefly wanted to ‘like’ them. I do like them, they’re good grapes. But seriously. Facebook?

/rant

I’m turning 33 in a couple of weeks. Does my flabbergastery over this make me 1,000,000 years old?

Edit: in case you want to ‘like’ them: Holiday Grapes Facebook Page

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Minnesota at a food conference with my mom, and we had some time to kill over the weekend. We went to a local farmers market, and they had bushels of peppers for sale, so we bought one of banana peppers and one of habaneros. We used these to make one of the most delicious substances I know; Hotzie.

That’s the name my brother Chris and his awesome girlfriend Jessica made up for the smoked pepper flakes my parents make. The stuff is addictive, and up there with truffle salt as something I can add to almost vegetable to make it more delicious. I love it so much I had my parents make tons of it to give out as wedding favors when Sam and I got married. It’s so addictive, my mom has to mail supplies of it to various friends to keep them from withdrawal.

I’ve never made it before, so it was fun to see how it’s done:

Habanero peppers ready for the smoker

The peppers were smoked in a mix of oak (from fallen trees in the forest behind my parent’s house) and apple chips:

Smoker 5000 in action

It’s not really called the Smoker 5000, but it’s so epic compared to my electric smoker, that’s what I call it in my head.

Peppers ready for the dehydrator

After smoking, the peppers are dehydrated for a couple of days, then flaked in the food processor. The processing part is a serious operation. Your lungs get a little charred from all the pepper in the air. Totally worth it though, for the smoky, spicy crack you get in the end.

When I got my smoker, I had grand plans to make fancy single-pepper versions of Hotzie, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Making this batch with my mom has inspired me to try making some for Christmas gifts.

It’s the name of a cookbook and restaurant.

The cookbook is filled with delicious-sounding recipes, with lots of parts (which I love in a cookbook. I hate when there’s just simple recipes that I would normally make with no recipe.) I’ve never actually made anything from it, just looked at the pretty pictures and read it for inspiration.

The first recipe I’ve tried came out deliciously:

Roasted mushroom salad with braised pistachios, pickled chayote and radishes

I followed it almost to the letter, but couldn’t find the sunchokes that it called for in the pickle, so I used chayote instead, which was good. Probably not quite as crisp as sunchokes. Pickled anything is good.

The dressing was the most interesting part. You simmered the pistachios in a Japanese broth until they sort of puffed up and were quite tender. These were blended into a dressing and also used to garnish the salad.

I hope to eat at the restaurant someday. The menu is just what I like to see. Short, with each item having been (I assume) almost perfected.