Vegetarian French Cassoulet

I know the very idea of a vegetarian French cassoulet is an idea of contradictions. French love a few things: butter, pastry, slapstick comedy, pencil-thin mustaches and meat. Also, from what I told they also love hating on Americans, but I’ve never been there so I can’t say firsthand. Part of me feels that the stereotype has been given the mythic proportions treatment, but the other part of me feels like, “Well can’t really blame them. We’re pretty gross.”

But this IS a vegetarian French cassoulet. Meat substitutions and vegetable stock replace the typical meaty ingredients. Just go generous with the salt. I was a bit conservative and I think it needs more than “to taste.”

I’m also skipping the bread crumbs because it gave the texture a more mealy grit to it and unless you’re talking about grits, it’s never a good thing for food to be described as mealy or gritty.

Vegetarian French Cassoulet (adapted from The Mediterranean Cookbook)

• 1/2 pound Trader Joe’s “Beef-less” Strips cut into a dice
• 1/2 pound Tofurkey Italian sausage cut into 1/2-inch slices
• 1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1 large yellow onion, peeled and chopped
• 1 large red bell pepper, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 4 15-oz cans navy beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 14 1/2-oz can diced tomatoes
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 cup vegetable broth
• Salt and pepper to taste

This recipe can either be cooked in the oven or using a crockpot

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees if using the oven.

Place “beef” and sausage in a large casserole or crockpot. Set aside. Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat and then add the onion, red pepper and garlic. Saute until onions and pepper are soft, about 10 minutes. Add to the casserole or crockpot. Add beans, tomatoes, thyme and vegetable broth to casserole or crockpot and stir all ingredients to combine.

If using a casserole, bake, uncovered for 90 minutes. Or cook in a crockpot on low for 6-7 hours.

Serves 8

Revenge Gone Wrong: Salted Brown Butter, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Pinterest. Facebook. Instagram. Friendster. If they’re not made for flame wars and trolls, they’re made for posting photos of food. Turns out there’s a Food Porn Daily website made just for people to Creme Fraiche all over themselves (South Park. NSFW). This website isn’t much different. I talk about food. My meals today have been supplemented by cookies I made purely to get back at a friend for posting a photo of delicious sounding cookies. Guess what? The joke’s on me.

The cookies are delicious. I’ve had 9 in the past 24 hours. That’s not healthy. I’ll tell you why. There’s nothing healthy about these cookies. The amount of butter, sugar and chocolate chips in these is something to behold. But adding salt to them? That was my downfall. Salty and sweet mingled together in cookie form? It’s all I can do to not go back to the plate and have another one. I can feel the stomach ache surfacing that only sugar can create.

So, much like The Ring, I’m passing this on to the next person. It’s on your head now. The original recipe came from The Cooking Actress. I didn’t have plain Greek yogurt, so I used honey-flavored Greek yogurt instead. There’s no noticeable difference, but I’m guessing a cherry-flavored Greek yogurt would make these cookies even more insane.

Salted Brown Butter, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 1 1/3 cup all purpose flour
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp kosher salt plus more for sprinkling
• 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 cup (one whole stick) unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup peanut butter, room temperature
• 3/4 cup dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tbsp. plain Greek yogurt
• 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

In a medium bowl combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. In a small saucepan melt the butter over medium heat and whisk constantly as it foams and browns (3 minutes). Immediately remove from heat and pour into a large bowl. Allow to cool for a few minutes. Using a mixer beat the butter and peanut butter together. Beat the sugars into the butters until fully incorporated. Beat in the egg, vanilla, and yogurt. On low speed, add the dry ingredients into the liquid ingredients. Gently stir in the chocolate chips. Allow to chill for at least 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Using a cookie scoop, scoop cookies onto ungreased cookie sheets (or ones lined with a silpat). Leave space in between as the cookies will spread. Using a fork, lightly press onto the top of each cookie in a criss-cross pattern and sprinkle the tops the remaining kosher salt. Bake 8-9 minutes, until the cookies have spread and the edges begin to crisp. They will still look underdone. Remove from the oven and cool on the sheet for 5 minutes, then move to a cooling rack.

The size of the cookie scoop I used made 2 dozen cookies.

Good Enough To Give You Diabetes: Nutella Swirl Pound Cake

I don’t have much to say about this recipe other than it’s delicious. Katie has a particular weakness for Nutella, so when I see an interesting recipe I bookmark it and eventually treat her to a bit of baking.

The recipe originally came from Food & Wine, but I found it on the Chicago Foodies website.

If you want to make it extra sugary to guarantee your own health downfall, and possible stomach ache, just do what I did and accidentally boost the 1 1/4 cups of sugar up to 1 1/2. It makes the crust extra crispy and your teeth extra tingly.

Nutella Swirl Pound Cake

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 large eggs, room temperature
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
• One 13-ounce jar Nutella

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a 9″x5″ loaf pan. In a medium sized bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt.

2. In a separate large bowl, beat together butter and sugar until light and fluffy using a mixer. Make sure your eggs are at room temperature to ensure your cake rises properly. Gradually add in each egg, and then the vanilla, until fully incorporated.
3. With your mixer on low, add in the dry ingredients to the wet little by little.
4. Spray or butter your pan. Pour in 1/3 of your batter. Spread with 1/2 of the jar of Nutella. Now, pour over 1/3 more of the batter. Top with the rest of the Nutella. Finish off with the rest of your batter.
5. Before baking, lightly swirl through the pan with a butter knife once or twice. Bake for about an hour and ten minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean from the center.

Allow the cake to cool thoroughly before serving. I know it’s tempting to dig into warm Nutella, but you will have a runny mess if you cut into the cake immediately. Serve for dessert with ice cream or enjoy with a cup of coffee for breakfast. Nutella is a healthy breakfast food, right?

I do not like your recipes Biggest Loser

We’ve been attempting to eat healthier, and to do so we invested some money in the Biggest Loser cookbook collection. We’ve also discovered the problem with many of the diet cook books: The food is bland. Chicago magazine’s food section, Dish, had a great quote from Andy Rooney (something I never thought I’d say):

“The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.”

Diet cook books as a rule tend to rely on only the essential ingredients for getting you everything you need to survive. But in many cases they also sacrifice flavor in place of weight loss. I’ve always felt that you lose weight because you end up hating what your new image of food is in your head. Most of us that are overweight love the TASTE of food.  Even with a salad wouldn’t you rather have the one that includes goat cheese, cranberries, candied walnuts and apples over spinach instead of the one that’s merely lettuce, tomato and cucumber? Of course! There’s different flavors blending together. The goat cheese’s bitter mixes with the cranberries’ sweet to provide you with something that tastes good rather than just filling not only your belly but your dietary need for vegetables.

Yet all those little extra things add up calories, and that’s not even counting a dressing if you get one. All those extra calories, even at 10 here or 20 there, soon snowball into you eating far more than your daily intake should be. For someone my age height, I’m told I should weigh 200 pounds. My current LoseIt calorie limit is 2000 calories. Man that seems like more than enough food for one day!

Yet I’ve yet to find a great cookbook that learns how to balance weight loss and taste. Skinny Bitch in the Kitch has some great recipes, but I can’t vouch for how diet friendly they truly are. Weight Watchers has a vegetarian cookbook, but man, most of those recipes are just not good. And as I’ve mentioned, The Biggest Loser books have some great ideas with just okay results.

Instead, like the recipe below, we’re learning to adapt things to have a little more flavor. Sure the calories may increase, but at least we’re trying to make a difference in our lives. The recipe started as a healthy Biggest Loser chicken cheese steak sandwich. The closer we got to finished, the more we realized this was going to be a bland meal. So what started as a cheese steak turned into a shredded chicken BBQ sandwich. We switched out fat-free cheese with fresh Muenster. We added salt and pepper. We made it taste better at the sacrifice of strictly adhering to the idea of losing weight. But how many sacrifices do you make before you’re once again fighting over what you weigh and what you want to weigh?

Anyone have any good weight loss/diet cookbook recommendations?

Shredded Chicken BBQ Sandwich

• 1 cup white onion, quartered and thinly sliced
• 16 oz Trader Joe’s Chicken-less Strips
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/2 cup BBQ sauce
• 4 slices cheese of your choice
• 8 ounce baguette, or sandwich roll of choice
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Heat the oil in a pan. Once hot, add the onions and cook over medium heat until soft, about 9-10 minutes. While the onions are cooking, shred/slice the chicken into thin strips. Add the chicken to the onions once onions are soft.  Add BBQ sauce,  salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly and cook until chicken is hot throughout.  Slice the bread into 4 equal servings (about 2 ounces per roll) and heat in the oven or microwave. Fill each roll with chicken mixture and lay a slice of cheese on top. Heat in oven or microwave until cheese is melted.  Serve.

Makes 4 sandwiches (3 if you were as hungry as we were)

Recipe – Chocolate Covered Pretzel Bread Pudding

Here it is, the completely, and utterly unhealthy bread recipe that I discuss in Episode 6 of the podcast. I adapted this from Epicurious’ Bread Pudding with Spiced Rum Sauce. I absolutely recommend putting a little extra effort into this and actually shaving the chocolate. Chocolate chips are too heavy, and will ultimately fall to the bottom of the glass, leaving very large pools of tarry, viscous goodness. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with that, but the chocolate will not be uniform throughout the dish.

For those people worried that there will be too much saltiness in their dessert, don’t worry. You can barely tell it’s pretzel bread in most bites. And if you’re still worried, leave off the crushed pretzels in the final step.

Chocolate Covered Pretzel Bread Pudding (serves 12)

Ingredients

• 8 large eggs
• 3 1/2 cups whole milk
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups whipping cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 8 ounces semisweet chocolate, grated
• 1 1-pound loaf pretzel bread, cut into 1-inch cubes
• ¼ cup crushed pretzels of choice (optional)

Directions

• Butter 13x9x2-inch glass baking dish.
• Whisk eggs in large bowl to blend.
• Add milk, sugar, cream, and vanilla; whisk to blend well.
• Stir the grated chocolate into the mixture.
• Stir in bread.
• Pour mixture into prepared baking dish.
• Cover and refrigerate 2 hours.
• Preheat oven to 350°F.
• Bake pudding uncovered until puffed and golden, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Check pudding by inserting a knife through the middle and it should come out clean.
• Cool slightly (pudding will fall). Pour chocolate sauce (recipe below) over mixture. Sprinkle with crushed pretzels if using. Serve warm or cold.

Chocolate Sauce (makes about 2 cups)

Ingredients

• 1 cup whipping cream
• 6 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions

• In a medium saucepan over low heat, stir whipping cream and chocolate until smooth, about 15 minutes.
• Stir in vanilla. Serve warm.