My most recent cookbook acquisition is Martha Stewart’s Slow Cooker, which I was pretty dang excited about. I appreciate a good slow cooker recipe, but the only other slow cooker cookbook I have is America’s Test Kitchen’s Slow Cooker Revolution. I have used the ATK book, but probably not as often as I should. Amazingly, I feel like the recipes in each book are different enough that the books complement each other in my cookbook collection.
The good things about Martha Stewart’s Slow Cooker:
Good variety of recipes. The book is divided into these sections: meat, poultry, seafood, meatless, side dishes, breakfast, sweets, and stocks/sauces. There is a decent global feel to each of the sections. For example, chicken section includes the following recipes: chicken tagine, Tex-Mex chicken and beans, chicken mole, Hainanese Chicken, and Ethiopian Chicken Stew.
Every recipe comes with a photograph.
Most of the recipes are not intimidating.
The (possibly) bad things about this book:
Some of the recipes require stove top cooking as part of the prep work. In the boullabaisse recipe, you have to soften in a skillet the vegetables, aromatics, and then cook down diced tomatoes. After all that, then you get to load up the slow cooker.
This might just be me being greedy, but I’d prefer if most of the sections had a few more recipes. The meat section has a little over 30 recipes. The poultry section has 18 recipes, 4 of them are duck recipes, and only 1 recipe is turkey related. The breakfast section only has about 9 recipes.
Honestly though, I have high hopes for this book. I made the chicken korma recipe this past weekend. Overall, I was very pleased with the results. It was a little unusual for a chicken korma recipe since it involves cashew butter and almond butter (it does mention that you can blend up nuts instead of getting the nut butters), but I think it does add to the texture of the korma sauce.
Well, no. I’m not actually going to write poetry about dinner. But I am happy to report that I finally got to eat dinner at Urban Hearth, a cute little restaurant found in North Cambridge, Massachusetts. *does a happy dance*
I was there back in the winter for the first time to try out their breakfast/lunch menu, and really enjoyed it. I meant to attend dinner there for my birthday some time ago, but I had trouble planning it when one of my friends headed off to Europe for vacation. Instead of another food-truck-adventure-staycation this summer, my sister suggested that we meet up and have dinner at Urban Hearth.
While Urban Hearth is a cafe with an a la carte menu during the day, it is a fixed price multi-course restaurant when the evening rolls around. You have your choice between 3 course and 5 courses, and you can add a wine option as well. We just did the 3 courses without wine.
Our meal started with an aperol spritz aperitif. Their version of aperol spritz had cava instead of prosecco. I don’t drink much at all, but I did like this cocktail.
Then, the starters came out. Technically, the starters are complimentary bites not listed on the menu. Both my sister and I should have gotten the same starter, but my sister has trouble digesting corn products, so she got an heirloom tomato and mozzarella plate. My plate was a tostada, it was really good and sign of the food to come: elegant and seasonal, but familiar. It had sweet corn kernels, avocado cream, zucchini, tomatoes, cheese, bell peppers, a natursium leaf, and probably cilantro too but very little. (For which I am grateful for as I am anti-cilantro. Sorry, cilantro fans.)
For our official first course, I went with the peach panzanella with seared halloumi, fresh greens, and olive emulsion. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all. It was well styled, and the halloumi was easily my favorite part of the plate, but the peaches weren’t as sweet as I had hoped, and the olive emulsion tasted like a puckerish vinaigrette. The bread part of the panzanella was really torn pieces from a nice loaf of bread that still tasted fresh. I guess I’m more accustomed to toasting cubes of old bread when I make panzanella.
My sister had the seared pork belly with English peas, kimchi, and radish. It was really gorgeous, and the pork had an amazingly dark sear that was probably just seconds away from being burnt. If I hadn’t chosen a meat heavy dish for my main course, I would have picked the pork belly for myself too. I will say that I don’t know where the kimchi was. Looking at the photo now, it looks like the plate had fresh and pickled radish. I guess the pickled radish was the kimchi.
When the first course was done, my sister and I were just chatting and sipping on our aperol spritz (we’re very slow drinkers when it comes to booze as our entire family just really isn’t inclined to any variety of alcohol in general). And then, the kitchen whipped out some steaming shishito peppers that had been seared in generous amounts of oil and topped with salt. Normally, I’m not wowed by shishito peppers (meanwhile my friends love them lots) but these were pretty good.
By the time the entree dish came to the table, I was already nearly full of good food, but I was determined to see the evening to the end. My second course was the beef tenderloin with chanterelles, kohlrabi dumplings, creme fraiche, greens, and blueberry sauce. I wouldn’t have thought to pair beef with creme fraiche and blueberries, but it doesn’t seem strange to me at all. I just never thought to do it. It was fabulous. And the kohrabi dumplings? I loved that too. The dumplings were basically like a potato gnudi except made from kohlrabi. I’m very tempted to try making it at home.
Meanwhile, my sister had the pan seared striped bass with grilled shrimp. She was also supposed to get spoonbread, but since that had cornmeal in it, the kitchen replaced it with kohlrabi dumplings (she also loved them). Not a bad word was had about the dish.
After the entree, we got our last palate cleanser: a little digestive/sugar cookie with elderberry jam fruit. This delicious. The cookie portion was a little sweeter than I personally like but not disgustingly so. I guess the only bad thing about this palate cleanser was that I couldn’t really savor it. It was the size of a two bite cookie, but you really had to one-shot it because the cookie crumbled the minute you bit into it. (Not that I speaking from experience or anything…)
But the dessert plate? That was something I got to savor as slowly as I wanted to.
Starting with my sister’s dessert, she got the chocolate bark. Visually, it was beautiful. I didn’t get to taste the chocolate, but I’m sure that it was good. I did get to taste the olive oil sorbetto, on the other hand. It was a little jarring at how savory it was, especially after the digestive cookie. It was made with a good quality oil, but extra virgin olive oil is a very distinctive flavor. My sister was confused when she first ate it because she forgot that it was listed as olive oil on the menu.
My sister may have picked the better first course, but we agreed that my dessert was the better of the two, which was the huckleberry pie with ginger whipped cream and basil oil garnish.
It was less elegant looking dessert, but the huckleberry mini pie tasted amazing with the ginger hints in the cream. I didn’t know how I was going to feel about the basil oil but I eventually found myself wanting a bit more of it on my plate. Right now, I want to try infusing some ginger into some heavy cream (oooh, and I can too, I have some heavy cream in the fridge this very moment), just so that I can whip it up and served it on a pie. Or a galette. Whatever you want to call it, I don’t care. (puts ginger whipped cream on the to-do-list)
If you are in the area, or ever find yourself in the area, I highly recommend stopping by Urban Hearth. Whether you just want to stop for coffee and breakfast, or whether you’ve got plans to spoil yourself for dinner. My sister and I are already planning our next visit.
Milk Street Kitchen (which I could also call Milk Street Magazine, Milk Street Cooking School, Milk Street Radio, or even Milk Street TV) had an open house this evening.
Here’s how it went…
:: I got a goodie bag from Che Maksou salon. There’s a little bottle of conditioner, shampoo, and some sort of “salt infused spray designed to work with other volume infusing products.” Uh, ok. BUT HOLY COW THE LABELS SAY THAT THE PRODUCTS ARE WORTH $30 ALTOGETHER. So, I’m looking forward to testing out some hair products in the near future.
:: We got to taste some recipes. There was, I think, a recipe from every issue of the magazine so far. There was Thai Steak Salad, Chili-Lime Melon Salad, Spanish Spice Crusted Pork Bites, Thai Coleslaw with Mint and Cilantro, and Tahini-Swirl Brownies. The brownies were good but I couldn’t taste the tahini. I was grossed out by the coleslaw because I didn’t realize that there was cilantro in it until I tucked into it. Having said that, it was still pretty decent. The other flavors of the salad helped to make the cilantro less disgusting. lol! (Yes, I am anti-cilantro. Sorry, not sorry.)
I did stay away from the steak salad from the start because I could tell immediately that it had cilantro. I’ve made my peace with not eating the steak because the pork dish was delicious! I ate a handful of that. Overall, I think the fruit salad was my favorite. So, I had a good serving of that too.
:: Andi Wolfgang, founder of NamaKiss, was there with samplings of her chocolates. I really liked them! The chocolates were the reason I was inclined to go to the open house. It turns out that I can get her chocolates just a couple of blocks away from where I live, so I’ll probably stop by the store sooner rather than later to pick up some. There was a goji chocolate fudge square (it also had a seed in it but I don’t remember what… pepita maybe?) that was my least favorite just because it didn’t see that special to me. I really liked the coffee bean chocolate fudge and the peanut butter chocolate fudge. The citrus vanilla truffle was good too.
:: BRIX Wine Shop had samples. I don’t drink wine so I stayed away. But they were quite popular.
:: There were cooking demos throughout the evening but I only watched the steak salad demo. Overall, the evening was lively and fun. I just didn’t want to spend my whole evening by myself watching demos in a crowded room. Plus I have access to all the magazine issues so far, so I’m not worried about getting a copy of any recipe.
: : And of course, there were issues of the magazine available. The issue was the March-April one, which is where the tahini brownie recipe lives.
All in all, I was glad I went. And I’ll be returning to Milk Street Kitchen this month for a cooking class. As long as I’m not lazy, I’ll do a write up on that too.
Wow, this post is a long time coming. And by a long time, I mean an entire month because of shipping issues that were out of my control. My Instagram account gets more regular activity than my blog (in case someone is interested), but that’s because it’s easier to post a photo than to collect my thoughts and try my best to jot it down in a manner that doesn’t make me sound like a rambling idiot. (Note, I am not always sure I succeed.)
But about two weeks ago, my review copy of Food52’s Mighty Salads finally arrived at my doorstep. People who know me best know that I don’t make salads much at home. When I do make them, they are very simplistic. My usual salad is arugula, tomatoes, and salad dressing. This is not a joke. My cooking in the last year has become about simple and functional recipes since I’m pretty much cooking every meal in advance. In the last two months though, I’ve started to play the macro game. (I’m trying to count my protein, carb, and fat amounts.) And in playing the macro game, I’ve found that I’m terrible at it and often need inspiration.
I almost didn’t get Mighty Salads, but I found that other reviewer comments made me curious. And I don’t refer to the positive reviews. I wanted to know if I agreed or disagreed with the few negative reviews I found.
The summation of the negative reviews I found is basically that the recipes were too complicated or used less common ingredients. Really?
Here’s a sampling of recipes:
Grilled Peach and Apricot Salad with Kale and Prosciutto
Petits Pois a la Francaise Redux
Grilled Lamb Kebabs with Tomato-Cucumber Salad
Slow Roasted Duck and Apple Salad
Admittedly, I’m picking on the recipes that might sound less accessible based on title. But here’s the thing: every recipe has a simplified subheading.
Grilled Peach and Apricot salad with Kale and Prosciutto is essentially a six ingredient recipe if I don’t count salt, oil, and some bread to serve with. The subheading is “sturdy greens + cured meat + grilled fruit + crumbly cheese”. Petits Pois a la Francaise Redux? It’s “charred greens + charred alliums + bacon + cream dressing”. But what if you don’t want to pick out your own greens and alliums to brown? Looking at the ingredients list, we’re talking about bacon, sugar, paprika, romaine lettuce, and green peas for the salad portion. The accompanying creme fraiche dressing is mayo, creme fraiche OR sour cream, buttermilk, and lemon juice. Creme fraiche could be difficult to get a hold of depending on your location, but, in the US, mayo/sour cream/buttermilk/lemons are pretty standard items at your local market.
Meanwhile, the lamb salad is broken down as “kebabs + vegetable chunks + herbs + yogurt dressing.” And the duck? “Fall apart tender meat + warm fruit + hearty greens + nuts + vinegar.”
When simplified to its basic building blocks, none of these salads sound that exotic.
What about in practice, how do these recipes turn out?
Well, that’s harder for me to answer. I did “cook” from the book. I say cook in quotes because I was strict about keeping to the amounts and ingredients for the Grilled Mushroom and Fig Salad recipe. Here’s what I actually used:
1 lb baby bella mushrooms, sliced
About half a bag of Trader Joe’s semi-dried green figs
About 4 cups of baby arugula
Shredded Parmesan cheese, amount unknown
Possibly two handfuls of regular almonds that I toasted
For the dressing, I actually kept to the recipe except for the minced shallots. 1) I got lazy. 2) I didn’t want onion breath while at work.
The original recipe was meant to serve 4, but my version was good for two lunches. Overall reaction? I liked this. I should not have used Parmesan but I didn’t have time to pick up ricotta salata which was the cheese my heart really wanted to use. (It was supposed to be Pecorino Romano but that’s not a cheese I use much.) It was filling and good. I wish I had marinated the mushrooms for longer than 30 minutes but I was assembling this salad at around 9pm. And for a 9pm “OH MY GOD I NEED TO ASSEMBLE LUNCH FOR WORK TOMORROW” session, it wasn’t difficult or too time consuming at all. (To be fair, I made the dressing earlier that day.) Another plus for me personally? Portabello mushrooms and cheese are decent sources of protein.
I will say that I have one issue with Mighty Salads. I found some of the tips to be random. For example, on the page for Freekeh, Fennel, and Smoked Fish Salad, there’s a “genius tip” regarding crunchy crumbled tempeh. It give a gives a quick blurb on what tempeh is, and one method of cooking it. It has absolutely no relation to the recipe on the page. I’m mystified as to why the tempeh note is on this page. And then I was mystified as to why there wasn’t at least one recipe that used tempeh, or at least mention in a recipe as a good substitution.
So is this a perfect book? No. But I will get some use out of the recipes this summer. It also doesn’t hurt that the photos in this cookbook are gorgeous.
Disclaimer – I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. I’m not getting paid for this post.
I learned at the last Gastropod live event at the Museum of Science that Polar is 1) a Massachusetts company, and 2) releases five limited edition flavors every season.
This led me to go looking for this seasons flavors.
(They also have super limited edition flavors sometimes, ie. the infamous “unicorn kisses” but I’m not that crazy.)
First of all, what? Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re asking yourself right now.
Nüssli118° is a raw foods store in North Cambridge, Massachusetts. They sell a variety of snacks, smoothies, and juices. It’s not fancy shmancy (or is the correct description “celebrity hip”?) like Sakara Life. Their website isn’t filled with slick sounding product descriptions like Splendid Spoon (which I might try some day because they do make their soups sound very tasty!).
Now, I’m not vegan or a raw foodist (I’m not even vegetarian) in any way, but I do get curious about the raw food culture. I guess it’s because I do like diversity in my meals, and healthy is always appreciated.
I’ve had a some Nüssli118° products in the past. There was some sort of ginger round, chocolate pecan squares, and their chocolate cashew smoothie. All of which were delicious. So, I’ve been really curious about the Nüssli118° day tote for a few months now.
From their website:
The Nüssli118° Kitchen Share Day Tote is a day’s worth of delicious meals, drinks, and snacks delivered to your home or office once a week. The products are ready-to-eat right out of the mason jar or to be gently warmed, served, and savored. Either way, they will nourish, satisfy, and energize you throughout your day. Each Kitchen Share Day Tote includes 2 drinks, 3 meals, 1 savory, and 2 sweets. We look at what’s in season, combine fresh, great tasting, high quality ingredients, and create delicious nutrient-dense meals. They are all organic, plant-based, and ready-to-eat, just enjoy!
If you go through my photos, you’ll notice that I didn’t get the taco salad. That’s because I’m allergic to raw celery and raw carrots. So, the store provided their mango kale salad as a substitute.
Overall, I liked this salad. I just wished that there had been a bit more of it. Besides kale and mango, there was jicama, lemon juice, olive oil, maple syrup and red pepper flakes. And since I was still hungry, I went ahead and had the soup. (Afterward, I remembered that each jar in my tote was technically a meal. Oh well.)
You can have the soup hot or cold. It was a really nice warm spring day in Boston, so I went for it cold. I liked this meal too. The cranberries and parsley helped to jazz up the otherwise plain tasting squash soup. I might have forgotten that cashews were in the soup and topped it with a tablespoon of hemp seed from my pantry.
Regarding the snacks, this is where Nüssli118° really shines.
No surprise, the super dark chocolate rounds were my favorite from the tote. The rosemary crackers were a close second. The lemon ginger squares were my least favorite only because it’s a little too sweet for my personal preference. But the texture is great. It’s got crunch from the nuts but it’s not hard on the teeth. The brightness of the lemon flavor shines through, but I’m not sure I could taste ginger much. At the end of the day though, I’m always pro-chocolate. The rounds are quite dense, but the chocolate flavor satisfies quite nicely.
Finally, I had the chia pudding for breakfast the morning after I picked up the tote. I was unsure if I was going to like it. Generally, I stay away from chia seeds because they get stuck in my teeth too easily. Maybe because I had let the chia pudding sit for so long, I didn’t really have an issue. It would have been boring if it hadn’t been for the fruit topping – apples, kiwi, and oranges – even though the pudding says it was spiced with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, clove, and nutmeg. I could tell that the pudding wasn’t just chia, cashews, and water. However, the spices were really muted.
As for the drinks? The cashew vanilla smoothie was good. Not the best I’ve ever had, but certainly not the worst. It’s just a basic cashew smoothie. The tote list says vanilla chai, but the bottle I had was just vanilla. The ingredients were water, cashews, dates, coconut oil, vanilla, and Himalayan salt. The pineapple turmeric was probably my least favorite thing in the whole tote, and that’s just personal preference. I found the turmeric flavor to overpower every other flavor. The ingredient list is pineapple, water, mango, orange, lemon, maple syrup, turmeric, and cayenne. I could barely taste the pineapple. I really couldn’t taste any mango or orange.
So, would I do this again? Quite possibly. It’s not cheap. It’s $65 and then there’s a $10 deposit for the tote and the mason jars. If you return the tote and mason jars, you can get a $10 credit toward your next purchase. I like that the packaging is reusable, and am not against the deposit. Overall, the quality of everything is great. (And it had better be! Everything is organic, and some ingredients have been sprouted.) The experience has definitely given me ideas on things to make at home. It also makes me want to work on snack recipes. But chances are pretty high that I’ll probably be lazy and swing by Nüssli118° when I’m hankering for healthy crisps and sweets. (^_^)
Two posts in one week? After weeks of nothing? Yeah, I know. My posting is inconsistent. What can I say? I need to feel inspired.
And inspired is definitely the right word here. I hadn’t planned on doing another meal prep kit post so soon. However, a new market opened in Davis Square/Somerville called bfresh last Friday. There are bfresh stores in Allston and Brighton, which I’ve never been to, but I’ve heard that Somerville is their largest location to date. I was unsure what to expect other than something that would fit the lifestyle of busy urban dwellers.
Quick review of the market – it’s smart looking. The price tags on many of the shelves were digital. It’s bright and small, but probably carries a little bit of everything. Prices were average. Some items were expensive. For example, I saw a package of tempeh for about $5. I usually pay just $3. There was onigiri! At $5 a pop. But I bought a bottle of coconut aminos because it was a $1 less than what I saw while shopping recently.
They have an app to get coupons and I’m not impressed so far. There were about 6 coupons available, and I only tried to use one. My one coupon didn’t apply for some reason when I checked out. Also, their website said something about getting free shopping bag when you download the app and I didn’t see any coupons in the app for said shopping bag.
I’m not sure if I missed something somewhere, or they just aren’t on top of their communications game.
I was also unimpressed that for a market that has literally only been open for a handful of days, there might be some mislabeled prices already. My coconut aminos checked out fine, but the meal kit I bought was a $1 more than I thought it was. I could have sworn that all meal kits were $13. (Ok, technically $12.99 but I always round up that one silly penny.)
Having said all that, bfresh’s strongest points are their ready made items, their cheese selection, and their bulk selection. And price annoyance aside, I was there primarily for their meal kits.
(Yeah, that price tag under gnocchi kit looks like it says $12.99. My receipt, though, shows $13.99. And I really wasn’t about to turn around and head back into a fairly bustling market to argue over my receipt.)
I didn’t even realize that they were selling ready to go meal kits until a friend of my commented on it recently. There were about 6 different recipes to choose from – pizza, lemon cod, salmon, sweet potato gnocchi, steak tips, and I think one with turkey. All of the kits are 2 servings. These kits don’t claim to be 30 minutes of activity like many other meal kits out there, although most of them probably don’t take too long.
I’m masochistic and picked the sweet potato gnocchi to experiment. This kit took me almost 2 hours to make, because roasting the gigantic sweet potato in my kit took about an hour in the oven. I made the sauce easily enough, but the gnocchi making took me more time than I had expected. I’ve never made ricotta gnocchi before, and it was quite the sticky mess.
Overall impression of the kit? Everything seemed pretty fresh. The spinach in my kit hardly had any bad/slimy bits. There was less packaging than the ready to go Purple Carrot kit I previously bought. (Or at least that’s how it felt as I carried it home.) The only potential downside is that you have to be somewhat comfortable with cooking and ingredients in general. The recipe card isn’t full of photos. The packaged ingredients had no labels. But for me, I was still impressed.
Now, remember how I called the Purple Carrot recipe card mildly cheap in my previous post? It’s because the bfresh recipe card is seems expensive by comparison. It’s laminated and shows the full ingredient list up front.
OH HEYYYYY! I JUST REALIZED THAT THE ESTIMATED COOKING TIME IS UNDER THE INGREDIENT LIST!
Anyway.
The recipe came out fine. I wish there were a bit more flavoring in it though. But that might be because, after all these years, I’m still not fond of goat cheese.
Yes, you read that right. The woman who’s not fond of goat cheese intentionally bought a meal kit with goat cheese in it. I should have subbed it out, but I thought that if I just didn’t use the full amount that I’d be ok. So, that’s just me being ridiculous and no fault of the meal kit.
I am sorely tempted to try every flavor of the meal kits. And since it’s affordable compared to shipped meal kits, I may just do so.
