Articles by traveleatlove

And I am eating some right now. I love making vegetarian chili, and from what I have heard, I am quite good at it 🙂 The recipe is never the same, but it is always chock full of healthy, hearty ingredients like beans, tomatoes, and corn. I have made chili with ground turkey before, but I just don’t think it adds anything special to the flavor. Feel free to disagree. 🙂

Tonight’s chili (which is actually last night’s chili, even better after a day) consisted of 3 large carrots, 1/4 red onion, chopped, 1 can plum tomatoes, mashed, 1 can black beans, a handful of pickled jalapenos, chopped, and a half bag of frozen corn. I started by heating up habanero oil and tossing in the carrots and onion until they were slightly soft.
 
Carrots are not common in my chili, but since we are going out of town I am trying to use veggies up. Once the carrots were soft, I poured in the can of whole tomatoes and used a potato masher to gently break them up. I like chunky chili, but otherwise you could definitely use chopped tomatoes or put them through the food processor. Once the tomatoes were the way that I like them, I added the black beans.

One big happy veggie family. The chili simmered on low while I started chopping this beauty.
I topped my bowl of chili with shredded Kerrygold Dubliner Irish cheddar, TJ’s 0% Greek yogurt, and avocado.

I had this bowl times two. It was soooo good. The habanero oil added just the right amount of spice, while the carrots added a slight crunch, and the beans and tomatoes gave it a warm, homey feel. The avocado was unbelievably good, perfectly ripe and buttery. I have another half to eat before I leave for San Francisco. I plan on chowing down on it with a squeeze of lemon juice and a sprinkle of sea salt. Just may be the perfect food. We also have a couple of cups of chili left which I am going to freeze individually for when we return from our trip. One thing I love about chili is that it freezes and reheats extremely well, making it an ideal meal to cook in bulk. When I return next week, I am going to make a big effort to start cutting BPA out of our lives, so my chili will be getting a little bit of a makeover. That is all for tonight. I am off to tackle this:
I have outfits to try, guest posts to upload, and an itinerary to organize. I am excited about all of the posts that I have scheduled AND about blogging from the sky again! Goodnight guys!

As you all know, I try my best to make a lot of home cooked meals, even if it is just a simple salad or sandwich. Sometimes it is really nice to have something quick and easy to pop in the oven. Trader Joe’s always comes to the rescue. First, let me just say that I love when my husband goes to the grocery store. While I love grocery shopping, I tend to get a lot of the same things and most of them tend to be healthy. When he goes, he gets all of the healthy stuff, but there are also always fun surprises that I would never buy myself but would definitely help out eating! Trader Joe’s turkey sausage stromboli was one of these surprises. So Sunday after I returned from our fabulous blogger lunch, I was still a little hungry, and the hubs was starving. I decided to pop the stromboli in as it was chilly and we were pretty tired from a late Halloween. These offer microwave instructions, but I had a fear of soggy crust so we waited the 26 minutes that they require to cook in the oven. When I pulled them out of the oven, I was immediately surprised by how crispy the dough had gotten. The smell was amazing, tomatoes, garlic, and a slight hint of spicy sausage. I don’t have a photo of the finished product because I butchered it pretty badly when I cut it into pieces for us. I was extremely surprised and pleased at how crispy the outside and the slight chewiness of the inside dough. The sausage was flavorful, not very spicy at all, but it tasted great. This could easily be something that you ordered in from your favorite pizzeria. Though I don’t like to eat a lot of meat or prepackaged foods, I will definitely be storing a couple of these in the freezer for snowy nights when we don’t feel like cooking and don’t want to have a delivery driver out in bad weather.

I suppose it wasn’t quite  a disaster, but the bulk lunch I made for this week is definitely not the best thing I have ever eaten. Every Sunday I do my best to make something that I can easily package up in Tupperware and bring to work to last me at least through Wednesday. Curries, chili, soup or big salads usually do the trick, keeping me full, within budget, and healthy.

This Sunday I decided on a tofu curry with parsnips and carrots because I had a load of parsnips and carrots to use up before I leave for San Francisco.

I broke out the slow cooker and started layering flavors to create my curry sauce. I started with a can of Goya coconut milk, Thai Kitchen green curry paste (store was out of red), Burmese curry spice mix, and habanero oil. I wanted a rich, spicy sauce.

I chopped the carrots and parsnips and tossed those, along with baby potatoes into the slow cooker to start cooking. In the meantime, I cut extra firm Nasoya tofu into small strips.

I left the carrot/parsnip/potato mixture cooking on high for about an hour and a half, and when I went back to check, nothing had gotten the least bit tender. But the sauce was drying up and browning around the edges. I turned it down to low and left it for another 30 minutes, and went back to find more edge-burning. I thought the beauty of slow cookers was that you could just leave them to cook and not really do anything? After a little longer I added the tofu in, and because the root veggies had so long to go, the tofu ended up mush. The sauce got extremely thick and almost gluey. The taste was worse. I don’t like green curry nearly as much as I like red curry, and for some reason it tastes like raw tofu?

I let it cool, packed it up, and brought it for lunch on Monday. It looks absolutely hideous and really doesn’t taste that great, but since we are traveling and going to be spending a bit of money this week, I really need to eat it. I actually skipped it today in favor of eating peanuts and apples. I have a colleague from Virginia and she always brings the best peanuts when she visits! So, the moral of the story I guess is that while I truly do love about 98% of my kitchen creations, there may be times where tossing ingredients together might not work. I am also a little jaded with the slow cooking process. What if I hadn’t been there to stir every 20 minutes? Oh well.

I am off to do some packing for the weekend ahead and to hopefully do some blog post scheduling. I have a few great posts coming up while I am away, in addition to some coverage of the Foodbuzz Festival and my wine country adventures. I am also really hoping to find the time to write a post on food in literature and food memoirs. It has been brewing in my head for awhile, and maybe sitting on a plane for 6 hours will be a good time to let it out.

Have you had any kitchen disasters? Were you able to recover them or did you just toss it? Any lessons learned?

(Don’t forget to enter my Blue Diamond giveaway! )