Adventures of a healthy-ish pseudo-foodie

Rice cake optional. Did you ever wish you could just eat guacamole for your meal, but then you feel like you should eat something with more substance/protein? I experience this wish often. And so, in a stroke of genius, I chopped up a hard-boiled egg and mixed it into my guacamole. It's a great way to bulk up your guacamole, or to remove the mayo from your egg salad, depending on your angle. I like the crunchiness of a rice cake to offset the mushiness, but it would also be good on regular bread or just with a fork. The Recipe: 1 egg, hard-boiled and chopped 2 tb guacamole  (I just mix 1 avocado with 1 tb lime juice and a pinch of salt, and maybe some red onion if I feel like it) Fold egg into guacamole. That's it. The Verdict: Overall grade: A- Overall reason: Nutritious comfort food - always the goal. Time to prepare: 30 seconds, if you have guacamole and hard-boiled eggs on hand Husband quote: (The husband is anti- hard-boiled eggs.)

I may only make this during asparagus season. The pairing was too perfect. This pilaf recipe is originally from  Sunday in the Kitchen , though I got it from a friend after being dazzled and perplexed by it at a potluck. The flavors are so well balanced and comforting. I also love that it has just enough international flair to be interesting, yet it's still neutral enough be served with a wide variety of other flavors. I highly recommend that you make asparagus one of those other flavors. This is the secret step. Why don't we Americans toast our rice with spices ALL THE TIME? It's so, so good. The Recipe: 1/2 onion, diced 1 tsp turmeric 1/2 tsp ground cardamom 2 tsp butter 1 c jasmine rice 2 c chicken broth 3 tb roasted pistachio nuts, chopped 1/4 c raisins salt to taste Melt butter in a sauce pan over medium heat. Add onions and saute until soft. Add turmeric, cardamom, and salt, and stir over heat for 1 minute. Add dry rice an...

Oops, the serving platter is full and I have 5 left? What to do, what to do... These are so simple and delicious. Just get some good-quality ingredients, put them together, and you've got a crowd pleaser on your hands. There's no cooking involved here, unless you get par-baked bread and bake it yourself at the last minute (recommended). Just layer bread with goat cheese, pear, honey, and cinnamon. I'm going to pull an Ina Garten here and specify that you should get "good honey." I don't think this would be good with your standard store-bought honey; I'd probably skip the honey in that case. Get yourself some truly delicious honey from the farmer's market and showcase it here. My honey of choice. My sister agrees; this bottle was mostly full before her recent visit. The Recipe: 1 baguette, sliced into rounds 4 oz goat cheese 2 tsp good honey 1 pear, sliced into as many pieces as you have rounds of bread cinnamon, to ...

YUMYUMYUMYUMYUM. My formula for cooking seafood is as follows: 1) Look up an Ina Garten recipe 2) Follow exactly, except replace gobs of mayonnaise with plain yogurt. And use less butter. 3) If the recipe says to fry, bake instead. And thus, we have  Ina Garten's salmon cakes , with a few fewer calories. I cannot resist the food-processed-veggies-waiting-to-be-sauteed shot. We love these and I make them often. It's a great way to turn 1/2 pound of salmon into 5 meals and add lots of vegetables in the process. I assumed that I had blogged them already until I looked today. This post is long overdue. I usually serve these over spinach salad or sometimes cooked spinach, with either honey-mustard or garlic-lemon-yogurt sauce. In the photo at the top, I served them with a sauce made from the zest and juice of 1/2 lemon, some veganaise, garlic powder, and salt. It was really really good. Some tips on helping them hold together: 1) Make smaller pa...

You could totally play the cloud-shapes game with these. The last  chickpea pancakes  were pretty good, but I wanted to try another recipe for comparison. And since I really, really wanted to give the last one some Indian flair, I decided to just go ahead and follow a recipe for pudla (Indian chickpea pancakes). I used  this recipe , minus the asafetida powder because I didn't have any. I did my best to convert pounds to cups and then scale everything down for the 2 cups of chickpea flour that I had, so my proportions may not be true to the original. I blame this for the extreme density of my pancakes. Next time, I will add more water and go for thin-and-crispy, rather than thick-and-hockey-puck-like. Don't get me wrong - they tasted good. But they were dense. Dry ingredient art. In other news, I've been growing cilantro in the windowsill for a few weeks and this was the first time I got to use some of it! For that reason alone I was going to enjoy my p...

Everything's better with avocado. Should you happen to have some leftover deliciously marinated tempeh (say, from  tempeh reubens ), this is a great thing to do with it. I apologize to the original source of this recipe, because I jotted down the ingredients without bookmarking it and I don't know who deserves the credit for this wonderfulness. If anyone knows, let me know. I think this will become a staple lunch for me. The Recipe: 4 oz tempeh, marinated and baked or prepared to your liking 1 avocado, gently mashed 1/4 c red onion, chopped 1/4 c carrot, chopped 1/4 c celery, chopped 1 tsp garlic powder 1 tsp lemon juice 1 tb dijon mustard salt and pepper, to taste Mix everything together. Eat on bread or alone. The Verdict: Overall grade: A Overall reason: Easy, delicious, healthy, and keeps well in the fridge for a few days. Time to prepare: 5 minutes if you've already prepared the tempeh Husband quote: (No husband q...

The photo makes me want to eat it again. Sometimes, Pinterest tells you to put goat cheese, harissa, avocado, egg, and honey on toast. And you obey. At the time, I was searching for inspiration to use up some leftover goat cheese. I happened to also have a surplus of avocado, harissa, and eggs on hand. It was meant to be. We agreed that this was something we'd find at  Off the Waffle . If you replaced a fluffy, buttery liege waffle with sesame Ezekiel bread, that is. The Recipe: 1 slice toast 1 oz goat cheese (I used herbed) 1/8 avocado, sliced 1 egg, cooked to your liking dollop of harissa drizzle of honey Top toast with harissa, goat cheese, and avocado. Place egg on top, and drizzle with honey. The Verdict: Overall grade: A Overall reason: Decadent and not unhealthy Time to prepare: 10 minutes Husband quote: "This is my new favorite breakfast."

The Fried One. But the baked ones were good, too. Recently, in an effort to have some New York style Chinese food on this coast, I tracked down a bottle of duck sauce at the Asian market. None of this dipping-egg-rolls-in-sweet-and-sour-sauce thing that West Coasters tend to do. However, I failed to find any good NY-authentic egg rolls to go with the sauce, so I decided to make some of my own. I pretty much followed  this recipe , except that I baked mine. Except for the one that I fried. And ok, the fried one was way more delicious than the others. But if you want to bake them instead, you can do that, and they're still good. I'm not too vegetarian to admit that I really like the little salty red specks of pork that are usually in egg rolls. For the 2-ish tablespoons that I'd probably put into one batch of egg rolls, I didn't bother figuring out how to get pork like that. But if you're making a big batch, or if you really like pork, maybe add...