Spring Cleaning and Turning a House into a Home

It finally got warm here. After what seemed like the longest winter ever (every winter in Chicago seems like the longest winter ever, even when they’re progressively warmer. I’m getting soft.) In fact, its been feeling downright summery lately. I’m trying really hard not to be fooled Chicago — I know you’ve got some snow left in you. I can sense it. But for now I’m trying not to think about that.

For many people, spring cleaning is sort of a natural occurrence with changing seasons. Winter is over, so now we can open the windows and change the sheets…or something. This is how most normal people who spring-clean operate, but for me its go big or go home. You know the feeling: you have the flu, and then its finally over and you feel like everything in your home needs to be sterilized. That’s kind of how things are going around here, except I wasn’t sick, just in a haze of ignoring all my little self-imposed projects. Add a need for massive reorganization to that and thats what is basically going on over here. Don’t know that feeling? That’s ok, its just how I am.

I’ve had a list of projects I wanted to do in/to this place for the entire time we’ve lived here. We moved into this apartment in the middle of last July in the midst of wedding crazies, so although we were incredibly excited to be in a new place that we loved, we kind of ignored it for five months or so while we got married. As far as the five months following the wedding…lets call that a recovery period. It takes me some time to wrap my head around things that I want to do and how I want to approach them, especially when reorganizing because we all know that sometimes you have to wait and see how you’re going to use a space, or whether a piece of furniture is working for you or not.

Having moved 13 times in the past nine years (yes really) I know a thing or two about having the space you’re living in feel extremely temporary and I am sooooo done with it. I’ve moved so much that a lot of my stuff has always been cheap quick-fix solutions and I haven’t really been able, or haven’t allowed myself, to make my home a real home. We actually got notice from our landlords this morning that they’re going to send us a lease renewal and we were discussing how it barely feels like we’ve lived here for 3 months, much less a year. Given that, and that we are going to be staying here for an indeterminate amount of time, we decided that its finally time to bring this place up to its full potential and also make things more functional for us.

So at the moment I’m leaning toward focusing on all the various decorating, redoing, cleaning, and reorganizing I would like to do in our home that I still haven’t gotten to and I plan to share a lot of those. We already started this weekend, and the house is in extra shambles because of it, even though these pictures don’t reflect that. I know things really don’t look that bad based on these, but even if my apartment were currently this clean there are lots of things I could nitpick. Hello giant stack of paper bags between our pantry and cart on the back wall? Just to give one of many examples.

Do you have any cleaning/decorating/reorganizing projects lined up for spring? I would love to hear about them.

Roasted Ham with Honey Thyme Glaze

Although Easter was ages ago, and no one is thinking about ham anymore, I wanted to share what we cooked for our pretty low-key and pork-heavy meal that day. Even though I’m late to the party, the recipe was too good to skip recording it.

My brother and sister-in-law sent us a “care package” in the form of a three-pound ham roast, a pound of bacon, a pound of loose sausage, and a jar of raw clover honey from a farm near them in Pennsylvania. We had been talking about this for a few weeks, but by the time we all matched our schedules up to ship and receive the package, it was suddenly the week of Easter.

But lets back up a second — growing up my family did celebrate Easter, but really only with baskets of candy and little toys and not with religion or brunches or even other extended family. In fact I cannot remember an Easter meal from my childhood at any point – it was for all intents and purposes just another day, and we certainly did not have ham. I am actually quite certain that I had never even eaten a glazed ham until about two years ago when Steve requested that I make one.

I will just come out and say that although I love pork and sugar, coating a ham in glaze has always just seemed wrong to me and some of the recipes I have seen online just scare me. Why not coat your ham in Dr. Pepper and then add more sugar? What a fabulous idea. But glaze is glaze is sugar, and its not like you can really get away with limiting the sugar in a sugar based recipe (without some chemistry of course, or simply choosing not to make it).

Two years ago I made the typical pineapple glaze with cloves that Steve wanted, which I will admit I didn’t specifically have a problem with. But because I like to make my life difficult (and also more interesting) I insisted we do this recipe the following year. It was good, but ended up being a huge sugar bomb, even more so than the pineapple glaze, and for what it was it ended up being slightly more work than I wanted to put in. Despite deciding to make it, It was also a recipe that I would never see myself even being that interested in making, but thats the problem in general — I had yet to find a glaze recipe for a ham that actually looked really appealing to me. So enter year three where we actually had a quality non-spiral cut ham coming our way, I was determined to find something that I was going to love, and also something that was not going to require me to run to the grocery store to buy thirty things or simmer a glaze down for thirty minutes.

But I digress, as I often do. I looked for a recipe in the few days leading up to the box arrival, but nothing really excited me. It was only when I opened the box and saw the jar of honey that I realized a simple honey glaze might be just what I wanted. What I found ended up being completely perfect, especially because we had a high quality ham. It accentuated the flavor of the ham without overpowering it. The picture above makes the ham look a little over-done, but it actually wasn’t. I forgot to tent the roast for the last forty or so minutes of cooking, but it actually produced an unexpectedly delectable caramelization of the meat and fat along the edges while keeping the rest juicy and perfectly cooked. Although we only eat a ham like this once a year, it was so good I wouldn’t hesitate to make this again on any other night. Although maybe not for a while — as you can see from the last few posts we’ve been on a little bit of a meat overload.

Roasted Ham with Honey Thyme Glaze

Adapted from Simply Recipes and Gourmet

Elise has a good explanation of how to prepare your ham for cooking, determine how long to cook it, and the internal temperature it should be cooked to. This makes enough glaze for a large 10 – 12lb ham. I made slightly less because my ham was tiny.

3.5 Tablespoons of melted butter
2.5 teaspoons of dried thyme
2 Tablespoons of cider vinegar
3 Tablespoons of honey
1 Tablespoon of brown sugar
1 teaspoon Annie’s Worcestershire Sauce*

Melt the butter in a small bowl in the microwave or in a saucepan over medium heat (I used the microwave). Add the rest of the ingredients and wisk together for a minute. Then brush your ham with about 1/3 of the glaze using a pastry or basting brush. Re-coat your ham with glaze 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through cooking, and remember to tent the ham with foil toward the end if it starts to get a little too brown (unless you like that sort of thing).

*I like to use this worcestershire sauce because this brand does not contain high fructose corn syrup.

Lemon Pot Roast with Garlic

I’m back from Japan and from the dead — I have barely had a moment to breath since we got back. I’ve been slowly working on editing photos, but I took more pictures on this trip than any other trip I’ve ever taken, so it’s been pretty daunting, and it feels like every time I sit down to edit them something pops up that I have to deal with. I’ve been really trying to make an effort to keep up with Flickr this year, so if you’re interested, they will make their way there over time.

Since we got back, one thing after another has compounded to keep me totally bogged down. Both of us got the flu about a week after we returned and somehow I am still not over the jet lag — the combination of the two was fabulous. Because of my complete lack of energy, the kitchen and apartment in general have been in various states of mega-disaster. So needless to say, for a while not much cooking was happening and what did happen was not memorable or even remotely good.

This past weekend I wanted to make something for Passover, but since the random googling of recipes has been letting me down a lot lately, I decided I needed more assurance that my time was going to be well spent. Steve reminded me that I’ve had this book for about a year and still hadn’t made anything from it. Not only do I trust Melissa Clark with anything she makes, but it has a nice hefty holiday recipe section that called to me, and I decided brisket was in order.

Brisket isn’t really something that I crave, and before this I had not made it at home. As I’ve said before, I have leaned vegetarian for a long time, so my experience with it is limited and generally that it is covered in barbecue sauce, for better or worse. If I’m at a barbecue place I tend to favor things other than beef brisket and when it’s served at family gatherings I tend to favor other things on my plate simply because I’m a carb addict (hello potato latkes). This is not to say that I haven’t eaten brisket and enjoyed it. My aunt makes a really good brisket, a recipe I had somewhere in my possession and have since lost somehow.

Although I do love barbecue sauce, this recipe struck me because it was very different than any brisket I was previously aware of. The meat is slow cooked in a lot of lemon juice and zest to balance out the richness. When you think of eating beef brisket you don’t really think of the bright flavor of lemon with it so it was hard for me to imagine, but it was. So. Good. The perfect anti-I’ve-been-eating-raw-fish-and-seaweed-for-a-week meal. It evoked memories of holiday dinners for me, but even if you don’t celebrate Passover, I think there is room for this recipe any day of the week.

Lemon Pot Roast with Garlic

Barely Adapted from In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite

6 garlic cloves
2 tablespoons of kosher salt, plus more to taste
1 beef brisket, about 5 pounds, trimmed of all visible fat
3 lemons
1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
2 cups of chicken broth (or water)

Mince one garlic clove and then add this plus the salt to a mortar and mash it into a fine paste (you could also use the back of your knife to do this). Cut the brisket in half* and season it with salt and pepper on both sides. Place it in a large glass baking dish and cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight (I did mine for 2 hours and it was great).

Preheat the oven to 325 F. Finely grate the zest of 2 of the lemons and juice all 3 lemons. Heat the olive oil in a dutch oven until it is very hot and sear the brisket until browned on all sides (10-12 minutes). Then pour the lemon juice over the brisket and add the chicken broth or water, enough to come about halfway up the sides of the meat. Depending on the size of your brisket, this may be more or less liquid than noted above so add or don’t add as necessary.

Cover the pot, transfer to the oven, and cook for 1.25 hours. Mince the other 5 cloves of garlic when the time is almost up, then turn the meat over in the pot and add those minced garlic cloves. Cook for another 1.25 hours, until the meat shreds easily with a fork. Stir in the reserved lemon zest and continue to cook in the oven, uncovered, for about 15 more minutes.

Serve with good bread, over rice, on a sandwich, etc. The books says you can keep this in the fridge for 5 days. It makes a lot, and I suspect it would also freeze well.

*If you have a large enough dutch oven, you may not have to divide your brisket in half. Mine is only 5 quarts, but the book recommends a 6.5 quart. I cut mine in half and browned it in 2 batches before adding everything back into the pot and putting it in the oven.

Butternut Squash Soup with Butter Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

Last year for Valentine’s Day, my husband surprised me by buying us two seats in a cooking class at The Wooden Spoon in Andersonville. The class was the weekend before Valentine’s day since we had actually made reservations at a restaurant in the city we’d been wanting to try for a while on real V-Day. We had a wonderful time at the class, and not as wonderful a time at the restaurant. In general my experience has been that there are huge crowds out for the night, and the food quality lessens overall because the kitchen is trying to pump out many courses as quickly as possible for loads of people. But of course, who am I to learn from my mistakes? This knowledge didn’t deter us from going out because we figured that the place had a Michelin star — that somehow absolved it from these known issues. Sure enough, we were wrong. I have no doubt that this restaurant is a fantastic place under normal circumstances that I fully intend to return to — but lets just say we learned our lesson.

The class on the other hand was really fun and we made some fantastic food; the menu was:

Salad of Fried Mozzarella with Arugula, Prosciutto, and Homemade Breadsticks
Butternut Squash Soup with Butter Toasted Pumpkin Seeds
Pork Tenderloin Scaloppini with Roasted Potatoes and Grilled Asparagus
Chocolate Mousse with Whipped Cream

The class was full — a group of 10 or so couples, and different parts of different recipes were broken up by couple. As someone who cooks a lot, I was hoping to get assigned something that I had never done before and not end up doing some boring part of the meal like chopping 50 shallots and then standing there watching other people do the rest of the meal. This definitely did not happen, everyone was engaged fully the whole time and everyone got a chance to do a lot of different things. My husband and I actually ended up making all of the pork tenderloin, which was great because I have leaned vegetarian for much of my adult life and have little experience with that. It did however also end up requiring chopping about 50 shallots.

Our instructor was very knowledgable and everyone in the class seemed to really enjoy themselves. And the most important part, the food, was superb. Most everything was something I would make again (if I ever got around to it, since I am the type of person who makes lots of new things). But the butternut squash soup was actually something special. Both my husband and I agreed that this was the butternut squash soup of our dreams. He in fact got up to get a few extra servings and made it well known to me that we needed to make this at home, preferably often, starting as soon as possible.

So of course we totally forgot that it ever existed until now, when we decided that “maybe it might be cute to make what we made in the cooking class last year instead of going out to dinner again on Valentine’s Day.” We then remembered the soup and decided that this probably couldn’t wait until Valentine’s Day.

And after all this, tonight I’m cooking something else entirely, because well, it’s just my way. I can rarely bring myself *not* to cook something new, and I think I also ruined it by making this last week, which made it too recent again. Given the agreement that we would not be going out this year, I had to take this opportunity to plan my own menu, which you can bet I will write about after Valentine’s Day is already over….I’ll learn someday.

Butternut Squash Soup with Butter Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

Friends, this is how a butternut squash soup recipe is supposed to be. Too many times I have made squash soup and there is way too much onion flavor and no sweetness. The internet is loaded with these recipes and I have tried many of them — I find this one superior to every other one I have found. Squash soup, in my opinion, needs sweetness, and this one has a lot of it. You could lessen the cider by about 1/4 – 1/2 of a cup if you’re concerned about the sugar and I don’t think it would make a huge difference.

Adapted from The Wooden Spoon in Chicago

For the Soup:
2 tablespoons of olive oil
3 tablespoons of butter
2.5 pounds of butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into 1/2 inch cubes (about 6 cups)
3 medium leeks, diced (white and light green parts only)
2 small carrots, diced
2 celery ribs, diced
2 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, and chopped
2 teaspoons of dried thyme
1 tablespoon of chopped fresh sage leaves (or dry)
5 cups of chicken or vegetable stock
1.25 cups of apple cider (I used Knudsen No Sugar Added)
.5 cup of heavy cream
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
.5 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
pinch of allspice
Creme Fraiche for garnish

For the Pumpkin Seeds:
.5 cup of pumpkin seeds
2 tablespoons of butter
.5 tablespoons of sugar
.5 teaspoon of cinnamon
pinch of cayenne

Melt the butter and oil in a dutch oven or heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the squash, leeks, carrot, and celery. Saute until slightly softened, about 15 minutes, then mix in apples, thyme, and sage. Add the stock and cider and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and then cover and simmer until apples are tender, stirring occasionally (about 30 minutes). Let cool slightly before you attempt to puree the soup.

While the soup is cooling a bit, make the toasted pumpkin seeds. Heat the butter in a small skillet, then add the pumpkin seeds and cook over medium – medium-low heat until they are lightly browned and begin to pop. Transfer them to a paper towel to drain the excess butter. Mix the sugar, cinnamon, and cayenne together in a small bowl and then pour over the hot seeds. Stir to fully combine.

Working in batches, puree the soup in a blender and then return to the pan, or make your life much easier and use an immersion blender. Stir in the heavy cream, cinnamon, cayenne, and allspice. Enjoy your soup with a sprinkling of seeds and a dollop of creme fraiche.

Stir Fry with Phoenix Bean Yellow Tofu

Lately I’ve been looking for different tofu brands, organic or not, but definitely best tasting. I’ve been cooking and eating tofu for at least a few years, but during that time I really haven’t paid much attention to where my tofu comes from or what brand it is. Sometimes it’s Trader Joe’s brand, other times whatever is at Whole Foods, and occasionally I’ll get an Asian brand at the fruit market near our house. To my tastebuds, none of these have ever really been better than another, with the exception of Wildwood, but Wildwood, being sold at Whole Foods is expensive, so I don’t get it all the time. It is also produced in California and New York, so I started to become curious as to whether other more local options existed, and that’s when I recently found out about Phoenix Bean.

According to the Yelp reviews I read, Phoenix was a great option produced on the north side. It could be purchased directly from the factory or at H-Mart in Niles. H-Mart is much closer to my house, so I figured before I’d try that first. So I headed to their giant cold case with all the tofu in the produce section, and picked up a package of plain extra firm and a package of the yellow tofu. I had never seen yellow tofu before, but it was the firmest tofu of all the kinds Phoenix sold there, and because I like my tofu firm I thought I’d try it. The yellow color comes from Turmeric according to the ingredients, so no problem there.

All of this sat in my fridge untouched for a while because I wanted to do something fancy with it, but then a few days ago that was thrown out the window as I needed to pack myself a lunch and needed a protein. I quickly stir fried the tofu and threw in some leftover brown rice and beauty heart radish from my CSA box. This was a near perfect lunch; near perfect because I was out of greens to toss in, but the simplicity really let the tofu shine, and boy was it worth it. It’s easily some of the best tofu I’ve ever had. It is wonderfully firm with a lightly chewy texture and a very pleasing flavor.

My only wish is that they were organic, or had some statement about GMO usage — the lack of either notice could be somewhat concerning, though I guess knowing how accurate that information is can be kind of a toss up anyway. But the good news is that H-Mart has tons of tofu options. Not only do they sell Phoenix brand, they sell a zillion other prepackaged kinds, as well as make their own in-house. While I was there I picked up some of the H-Mart made tofu and a prepackaged organic brand labeled mostly in Korean except for the brand name, Pulmuone. It turns out that Pulmuone owns Wildwood and they are the same thing — and they are over $1 cheaper at H-Mart than at Whole Foods.

So I think I’m going to keep going to get my tofu at H-Mart given that there are so many reasonably priced options, and I’d love to check out the Phoenix factory at some point. Supposedly they also sell fresh Soy milk leftover from the tofu processing which I am now very curious about.

Stir Fry with Phoenix Bean Yellow Tofu

If you don’t have beauty heart radish, you could substitute Daikon Radish. If I had spinach, Chard, or Kale on hand, I would have thrown some of that in here as well at the end of cooking for a few minutes until it wilted.
~
2 Tablespoons olive or vegetable oil
1 Teaspoon of toasted sesame oil
1 14oz package of yellow tofu
3/4 cup of cooked brown rice
1/4 cup soy sauce or Tamari
1/2 of a beauty heart, daikon, or regular radish, diced

Remove the tofu from the package and wrap it in a kitchen towel or a few layers of paper towel (though I find a kitchen towel works better). I put mine on top of a plate and then put another plate on top with something heavy to hold it down (a mortar and pestle works really well for this, as you can see; you could also use some heavy books). Leave the tofu to press for a minimum of 20 minutes, ideally 30, but 20 is ok if you don’t have a lot of time. The longer you leave the tofu draining the firmer it will be when cooked and the more flavor it will absorb. Since I cooked this in the morning, I set it up to press, then went and showered and changed and came back to cook.

When you’re ready to cook, heat the oils together in a large frying pan over medium-high heat. Slice up the tofu into tiny rectangles/squares/however you like, and when the pan is nice and hot, add the tofu, in one layer against the pan as much as possible, and then don’t stir or move it at all for at least 5-7 minutes. When you see it start to get golden around the edges closest to the pan, it is ready to flip. You can stir it up or you can painstakingly flip each piece individually to get it evenly golden on the opposite side — I choose not to do this.

Once the tofu is nice and golden, pour in the soy sauce. It will bubble and steam and get caramalized. While this is happening, pour in the rice and the chopped radish and stir it all up vigorously so that everything gets coated with caramalized soy sauce/sesame mixture. Pack into a lunch box or eat immediately!

Almond Flour Belgian Waffles

Breakfast is not my favorite meal of the day. 90% of the time I completely ignore its existence, unless of course, someone else is doing the cooking. The other 10% is when, once every few months, I somehow gain the motivation to spend what seems like forever standing at the stove making pancakes (which only sometimes turn out well).

With that in mind, homemade waffles have been turning up an awful lot in our apartment the last few weeks. This is all due to my cousins (thanks guys!) who purchased my husband and I this shiny waffle iron that we registered for despite my worry that it would be yet another appliance that would never be used ever (I’m looking at you, ice cream maker). We’ve actually been using it a ton, and I don’t think that will be changing any time soon.

I always thought waffles would be a huge pain in the ass to make, but they are actually really simple. I would argue they are simpler than pancakes — you don’t need to flip them, once you know the cooking time you can just churn them out, and you can easily just freeze them and eat them later. I know people freeze pancakes too, but in my experience,they really don’t come back to life in the same way. The first waffle recipe we discovered turned out to be the best recipe either of us had ever had, which was Waffles of Insane Greatness. Since then, I have learned of a few others which I have not yet tried; Marion Cunningham’s Yeast Raised Waffles, Bittman’s Overnight Waffles, and of course Liege Waffles. There are many written comparisons of some of these to each other floating around as well.

As much as I love the WOIG recipe, lately I’ve been in the market for something a little less heavy. I love dairy and gluten but if I’m being honest with myself, I can’t eat them constantly all the time, so I wanted something similar to that recipe that took out some of the more inflammatory elements. I couldn’t really find one gluten free recipe that served my purposes, so I combined a few recipes to come up with these — and they are definitely noteworthy. They have the flavor and texture of Waffles of Insane Greatness without a ton of the richness. Bonus: we don’t usually keep milk (much less buttermilk) on hand, so doing these with unsweetened almond milk and having them turn out great was fantastic. Depending on your sweetness threshold, you may want to add a bit more sugar to these, but I think they’re fine as they are. And additionally — did I just post two breakfast recipes in a row, as someone who really isn’t *all that into breakfast*? I believe I did.

Almond Flour Belgian Waffles (Gluten Free)

Makes about 4 large Belgian Waffles, adapted from Waffles of Insane Greatness, and a few other places.

1.5 cups of Blanched Almond Flour
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1/2 teaspoon Baking Soda
2 teaspoons Baking Powder
1/2 cup Arrowroot Powder
2 teaspoons of Sugar
2 tablespoons of Canola Oil
1/4 cup of water
1 tablespoon of Vanilla Extract
2 teaspoons of Apple Cider Vinegar
1 Cup of Unsweetened Almond Milk
2 Eggs

Mix the 2 teaspoons of apple cider vinegar and the almond milk together quickly with a fork until the mixture becomes a bit frothy. Let it sit for a few minutes while you prepare the other ingredients.

Wisk the dry ingredients in a medium bowl (Almond flour through Arrowroot). To the dry ingredients, add the canola oil, vanilla, eggs, and sugar, and water. Add the almond milk and vinegar mixture to the bowl and wisk everything together well until just combined. Let the mixture stand for 30 minutes so the baking powder/soda and vinegar can do their thing.

Follow the directions on your waffle maker to continue preparing the waffles. For mine, I needed about 3/4 of a cup of batter for one waffle, and they took exactly 3 minutes to cook. Serve immediately, or let cool for a minute and then freeze the leftovers.

*Note: If you freeze these, I would put them in the microwave to reheat them first and then toast for a very small amount of time. I think because these are much less dense than regular waffles, I had some trouble with these burning when left to toast for too long.

Clean and Season a Second-Hand Carbon Steel Wok

When my husband and I moved in together a few years ago, it didn’t take long to realize we were both lacking adequately sized cookware. Each of us having been on our own for so long, we had only the small odd unmatched cookware that single people often acquire. This included his small non-stick wok. I haven’t measured it, but I am pretty sure it isn’t even 12 inches, and it has never been useful for cooking food for more than one person. Despite its flat bottom, the handle is heavier than the actual bowl of the wok, so it can’t stand on it’s own while empty. For a very long time we’ve been using other non-stick pans in place of this wok because it just wasn’t working for us, but it’s been obvious for some time that this isn’t ideal. The food doesn’t brown nearly as well, you can’t stir or turn things as quickly, and the pans don’t get nearly as hot as a proper wok would. Fast forward a few years and we’re just deciding to finally maybe get a new wok. Then magically this appeared in front of me at the thrift store:

The best kind of wok: approximately twice the size of ours, carbon steel, and in semi-decent shape. It looks like a Joyce Chen wok, but the new Joyce Chen ones I’ve seen recently have lighter colored wood handles. I’ll admit it looks a bit rough, but I wasn’t about to let that scare me off. Because I’ve never tried to season a wok before, I wasn’t really sure what I was in for or if it would even work out, but $8.99 and some elbow grease was all that was between me and a more functional piece of cookware, so I decided to give it a shot.

The first thing I did was wash the whole thing thoroughly with a tiny bit of dishwashing soap and water and the soft side of a sponge. It was pretty grimy, so doing that first step at least took off a light surface layer of ick.

The next step was to get the partially burned on food and grease off all the way so I could start with a blank slate to re-season it. I read many sources that said not to boil water in carbon steel or cast iron because it will rust the pan. This is true, but if you’re trying to get layers of old oil and food off the pan, you kind of don’t have a choice. I boiled a 1 to 1 ratio of vinegar and water in the wok and then added a few tablespoons of baking soda to loosen all the stuck-on grit.

As you can see, it worked, but the wok also did lightly rust around the edge of the water line. At this point I broke out some very fine grit sandpaper and sanded the rest of the rust off. Be sure to clean out the wok really well after doing this and then dry it with a paper towel (you don’t want shavings in your food, and you don’t want the pan to be wet for the next step).

Heat the wok over medium-high, the bottom area will slowly change colors and darken considerably (if it doesn’t, it isn’t getting hot enough). Once the wok is really hot, add some vegetable oil to the bottom and coat the entire inside by wiping the oil all around with a paper towel held by tongs, then turn the heat down to medium and continue heating the wok for 10 minutes. When 10 minutes are up, wipe off the excess oil with a new paper towel and the tongs. There may be some black residue that is wiped up by the paper towel. The wok is seasoned when there is no black residue left. Repeat the process as many times as needed.

And here it is all shiny and finally finished. I did this slowly over a few evenings (hence the different lighting in the photos). We’ve since used the wok a bunch of times, and it is so SO much more functional than the small wok and the other coated non-stick pans that we were using. For about $9.00, I call this a win.

Egg Breakfast Casserole with Feta and Spinach

Over the course of 2012 I lost some weight. Actually, not just some weight, a very good amount — about 35 pounds. This was a big deal for me, because I’ve been heavy for much of my life and this particular time, I really feel like the weight is coming off and staying off because I’ve finally managed to figure out a lot of underlying metabolic issues and other habits that I was previously unable to manage. This recipe is representative of of some of those principles, and it is one of the first recipes I started making when I was trying to make an effort to cook specifically for weight loss.

I learned very quickly that eating a lot more protein than I *thought* I needed made a huge difference in just about everything. My energy level, my hunger throughout the day, my desire (or lack thereof) to really even think about food at all changed drastically. I went from being someone who was hungry at all times to thinking about eating maybe twice a day – for me that is unprecedented, and something I never really thought could be possible. It completely changed the way I thought about nutrition and my view of different categories of foods.

Specifically, a high protein breakfast made a huge difference for me. When I first found recipes similar to this, I questioned how good eggs baked in a casserole dish and stored in the fridge throughout the week could be. As it turns out, they dokeep well, which is great news because that makes this an incredibly speedy alternative to cooking eggs or egg whites every morning.

Egg Breakfast Casserole with Feta and Spinach

There are a thousand ways you can change this recipe, and I have changed it around many times. I think this version is probably my favorite. This dish really benefits from a strong cheese; good feta is really good in this, as is blue cheese. I’ve used soft goat cheese in here as well, but the flavor is not as sharp and I don’t like it as much. You can obviously swap out spinach for whatever greens you’ve got (kale and chard both work well).

Makes 6-8 servings, adapted from Kalyn’s Kitchen.

About 8 ounces of spinach, washed
1 tablespoon of olive oil
4 ounces (or a 1/2 cup) of Feta Cheese (I used Montchevre Goat Milk Feta).
12 eggs
1 teaspoon of dried rosemary
1 teaspoon of dried thyme
1 teaspoon dry minced onion
1/2 teaspoon of dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon granulated garlic
1/4 teaspoon hungarian paprika
1-2 tablespoon of parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon of hemp seeds (optional, but another excellent source of protein)
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 375 F and then wash the spinach. Heat the olive oil over medium high heat in a pan large enough to contain the greens. When the oil is hot, add the spinach and stir until it is just starting to wilt, about 3 – 5 minutes. Remove the pan from heat and set aside.

Butter or oil a 13″ x 9″ casserole dish. Pour the cooked spinach into the dish and spread evenly over the bottom. Crumble the feta evenly over the spinach. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs and all seasonings together. Pour the eggs over the spinach and feta, then sprinkle the top with a little parmesan cheese. Place in the oven for approximately 45 minutes, or until the casserole is set and the top is brown. If using hemp seeds, sprinkle on top after the cooking is finished.

Slice the casserole and store it in the fridge for later consumption (this will keep for about a week). I reheat mine for 45 seconds in the microwave, but microwave cooking times vary. This is also delicious topped with sriracha or tabasco sauce.

Editing and Traveling

After the wedding, people kept asking us if we were going on a honeymoon. The extent of any “plans” made for our honeymoon have essentially consisted of us mutually agreeing “Hey we’ve never been to Hawaii and we’d love to go! At some point…” And that’s about it. No real plans set in stone in any way. In the last few weeks, other trip opportunities were presented to us — not as honeymoons mind you — but friends planning cruises and other work related travel.

So it turns out we’ll be going to Japan in the early spring, and on an Alaskan cruise in the middle of the summer. I am SO. Incredibly. Excited. That I don’t even know how to tell you. Both are places I’ve really wanted to go to for quite a long time. This obviously takes the possibility of Hawaii off the table, but I am clearly not complaining about that given what is actually happening. I’m still not entirely sure what or if we’ll do an “official” honeymoon now. With two big trips on the horizon, perhaps we’ll opt for something really low key, or maybe just count one of these trips as that.

In light of all this, I’ve been trying to pick my camera back up and practice shooting and editing so that when the big trips come, I’m ready. I’ve been known to take tons of pictures on a trip and then let them sit on my hard drive for ages without ever being edited or looked at again, so I thought I’d start with some older photos that have been sitting on my computer for a while untouched. I thought I’d share some of the recent edits I liked. You can see more on Flickr.

A Fresh Start

2012 had its ups and downs, and was generally kind of a blur. Overall it left me with a lot to be thankful for. Among other things, this happened:

Stephen & Melissa Wedding Photograph by Laurie Peacock

It was a wonderful, exhilarating, and exhausting weekend spent with many family and friends. Although I spent much of 2012 in a stressed out wedding-frenzy, everything went incredibly smoothly the day of. When you look at wedding pictures on Style Me Pretty or Ruffled, you think you know how it might feel to be the girl standing in those pictures, but ultimately you spend a year planning your wedding to spend most of the day in a deer-in-headlights state of shock, and it’s a wonder any of those pictures turn out as well as they do.

Although 2012 was a great year, it was also kind of a strange one. Even though it was filled with lots of great wedding related design, planning, and events, I didn’t really get to do much of anything else that I wanted to do. Personal projects pretty much completely fell by the wayside, and although I guess planning a wedding is like the mother of all personal projects, it felt like a year where I lost time in other creative realms of my life.

Now that things have calmed down, I have been thinking a lot about what comes next. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is usually a week of renewal, but this year it was especially cathartic. The past few years of my life have been especially chaotic for various reasons, and I feel like things are finally settling in. I spent much of that short week regrouping, cleaning, organizing, and reflecting. I have many goals for this year, and it was nice to sort out what I’ve been doing and what I’d like to do, and try to begin to fill in the gaps. There’s a lot of work to be done, and I’m up to the task. Bring it on 2013, I’m ready for ya!