Black Beans and Yellow Rice

When I first tried making black beans, I had no clue what I was doing. I bought a can of Goya and made some rice. Then I opened the can of beans onto the rice and tried to figure out why so many people raved about black beans. They were mealy, kind of cold, and super bland. Then I checked the Internet and it turns out you cook canned black beans and season then before eating. And my parents thought I didn’t learn anything in college.

Additional life lesson? Spices make everything better. I like my beans spicy, so you’ll see a variety combined in the recipe but for some reason I wasn’t feeling my traditional white rice accompaniment when I started making these beans for dinner. I could pretend that it was a culinary yearning to expand my palette, but in reality I just wanted to experiment with turmeric again. I bought my first container for my lentil soup, but it was just sitting in my cabinet begging to be used.

Fun fact about turmeric: it’s also called the poor man’s saffron. Very apt in my situation.

So beans and yellow rice it was, and the turmeric was a very nice addition to a staple of my diet. Give it a shot!

How to: Peel Garlic Quickly

When I first started experimenting with cooking I knew a couple things: I loved onions and I loved garlic. Both are still true today, but I today I actually know how to prepare those ingredients. When I started cooking alone, I could figure out how to chop an onion fairly easily (the hardest part was gaining enough confidence to slice evenly) but it took me a while to figure out how to get the garlic out of its skin. I used to slice off the bottom (where it attached to the bulb) and then try to get the knife tip underneath the skin and slice upwards.

As you can image, this resulted in more than one bloody knuckle.

This technique is one of my favorites. You basically smash the garlic clove while it’s still in its skin. This allows you to easily peel the skin off and gets the clove nice and flat, making it all the easier to slice for usage. Plus smashing things with knives is just cool.

Black Bottom Cupcakes

Part 2 of the “Make My Co-Workers Love Me” Cupcake Campaign. I had wanted to make this recipe for a long time – it’s a chocolate cupcake surrounding cheesecake filling – how could it go wrong? But I knew if I ever made them by myself, I’d spend the next few days in food coma because no force on Earth would stop me from stuffing my face with these treats. Luckily co-workers provided both the excuse to make them, and the audience to eat them.

It worked out perfectly because these suckers are delicious. And surprisingly easy to make.

Peach Butter

Somehow DC is still getting fresh East Coast peaches and it seems a shame to waste the last gasps of summer while I still can. Especially when I have a LivingSocial to Whole Foods to use up. Anyone else buy that? Probably my favorite promotion of their's yet.

Peach butter is not really a butter - it doesn't have any dairy in it at all in fact. It's basically Apple Butter but made with Peaches. It's a great spread for baked goods and I enjoyed its presence in a chicken wrap I made earlier. 

How to: Skin a Fruit Easily

Man that sounds a little “Silence of the Lambs” doesn’t it? In any case, many recipes call for skinned peaches or tomatoes and using a peeler doesn’t work as well on those as it does on a potato or apple (trust me on this one). While you may look at the following trick as more hassle than it’s worth (what I have to boil the water and make an ice bath? What part of this is easy again?), being able to use your fingers to remove the skin from a peach after about 1 minute of effective cooking time is awesome.

Peach Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Cream Cheese Frosting

My office holds a monthly birthday party for everyone in our group (about 150) that relies on the kindness of my co-workers. Every month the organizer asks for volunteers to bake for the group and every month it’s amazing to see how many amazing bakers there are in the office. This past month’s celebration saw yellow cake with chocolate frosting, lemon cheesecake bars, berry crumbles, fudgy brownies, chocolate cupcakes, spice bars, and two types of cupcakes I brought in to bribe everyone into liking me.

I worked at this office my first year of graduate school as an intern and now that I’m back, I wanted to make sure they’d all think of me nicely again. Mercenary that I am, that meant volunteering to make something when the organizer asked for additional volunteers for this month’s celebration. Never mind that I didn’t have a muffin tin at the time, I was going to make delicious delicious cupcakes and everyone would think “that Julia, where’s she been all my life for the last year?” (Answer: writing a thesis).

This is the first of two recipes that I made and I will definitely be making again. They were pretty easy to make (made even easier by the help of my friend Ellen who gave up five hours of her Sunday, including several long walks up and down the hill leading to my apartment to pick up some last minute ingredients at the grocery story) and received rave reviews from my coworkers. Mission accomplished!

My Mother's French Tart Recipe

This tart is a wonder in that it was a dessert everyone in my family could eat (from my father who is on a low-fat diet to my sister who eats gluten-free to my mother and I who like tasty desserts). It was also amazingly simple. The hardest part was pitting all the cherries and making sure they looked nice on the top of the tart. 

Egg and Pesto Stuffed Tomatoes

This is the time of year where you try to figure out how many ways you can eat a tomato. I always feel vaguely guilty for squandering a wonderful opportunity because my first inclination is always to add some olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette and eat them raw. But you can only eat that dish so many times before it becomes boring and then I ignore tomatoes until January, when I desperately wish they were in season instead of turnips.

Because seriously, in the battle between tomatoes and turnips is it really a question?

So this recipe was a nice discovery. It’s quick, easy, and it’s another way to eat fresh tomatoes. Win all around!

Pear and Shallot Grilled Cheese

Eagle-eyed readers might notice some similarity in ingredients between this recipe and Wednesday’s. Even more eagle-eyed readers might notice a common theme between this recipe and last week’s lentil soup recipe.

Shallots.

Yes, I’m in a shallot rut. When I bought the ingredients for the lentil soup I had never cooked with shallots before; so when I saw “3 shallots” on the suggested ingredient list, I bought three physical root vegetables. Turns out, shallots are a bit like garlic and have bulbs inside their tricky physical exterior. So I’d bought triple what the recipe called for, whoops!

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the excess for a while. Caramelizing it alongside garlic worked amazingly well, but I still had a giant bulb leftover. Looking into the depths of my refrigerator, I decided to play my favorite cooking game – namely “what will happen if I toss all these random ingredients together?” So I grabbed a pear my mother had sent me from our last trip to Lyman Orchards, the dreaded leftover shallot, a cooked chicken breast I had prepared in case the power went out (and then didn’t bother to eat because my power stayed on), some cheese, and began to ponder.

Grilled cheese immediately came to mind and since I’m a relatively lazy cook I decided to give it a whirl. And man was I lucky. This turned out to be a pretty great sandwich that comes together very quickly.