Category Archives: The Kitchen

Challenging food: how to use Swiss chard in recipes

Swiss chard is one pretty vegetable, with bright green leaves and stalks that grow in various shades of white, red, pink, orange or yellow.

Prior to setting sight on one of these multicolored bouquets, I’d never felt compelled to try to cook Swiss Chard because they had never been easily available to me.

When we got some at the small market where I work, I immediately bought one bunch and decided to challenge myself in finding a way to use it in a recipe.

Here are two delicious and nutritious recipes that came out of it:

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Pictures of beautiful food: Blood oranges + recipe Fennel and blood orange salad

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These gorgeous (and delicious) blood oranges don’t seem to know if they want to be red or orange.

(See below for the blood orange and fennel recipe. Voir plus bas pour la recette de salade au fenouil et orange sanguine)

When I finally mustered the will to cut these pretty things, I made the following recipe with them:

Fennel, blood orange and walnut salad

Ingredients for the salad: (serves 2)

1/2 bulb of fennel, cut into julienne slices

Handful of walnuts

100g Mesclun salad

2 blood oranges, each slice cut in half

1 Ryvita sesame rye cracker, broken into small bits

Ingredients for the dressing:

2 tablespoons Olive Oil (choose your favorite but lighter tasting is better in this case)

1 tablespoon Honey Dijon mustard

1/2 tablespoon Sherry vinegar

Salt and pepper

How to serve it:

You can mix all the elements together in no particular order, or you can dip the cracker bits in the dressing for a few minutes, then put them and the remaining sauce into the salad.

Salade de fenouil, orange sanguine et noix de grenoble:

Ingrédients pour la salade (pour 2 personnes)

/2 bulbe de fenouil, coupé en juliennes

Une poignée de noix de grenobles

100g de salade Mesclun

2 oranges sanguines, chaque tranche coupée en 2

1 craquelin au sésame et seigle Ryvita, cassé en morceaux de petite taille
Ingrédients pour la vinaigrette:

2 cuillères à table d’Huile d’olive (choississez votre préférée, mais une huile plus douce complémentera mieux le goût des oranges sanguines)

1 cuillère à table Moutarde de Dijon

1/2 cuillère à table Vinaigre de Xéres

Sel et poivre

Comment la préparer:

Vous pouvez mélanger les éléments sans ordre particulier, ou vous pouvez tremper les morceaux de craquelin dans la vinaigrette pendant quelques minutes, puis les mettre avec le restant de la sauce avec la salade.

Sweet sundays: Spice cake french toast recipe

All in a day’s work: planning dinner recipes in advance

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Each week, I try to prepare creative, healthy meals that will provide to my boyfriend and I the energy that we need in order to get through our long workdays.
Since food is one of my tasks on the common chore list, I need to find ways to be able to cook my dinners in advance because when the work week starts, I don’t have the time to do it. Currently, I try to cook 3 or 4 dinners at a time, usually on Wednesday afternoons. This way, dinners are ready until Saturday.

This is how I usually function:

On Tuesday evenings, I map out the list of recipes I’m going to make. My criteria is: healthy ingredients, flavor and accessibility of ingredients (I need to be able to buy them at the store where I work or at another grocery store that is near my house). I also try to prioritize recipes that I can cook at the same time (so they share ovens and don’t require too many stove elements).

The thing with me is that I don’t like to repeat myself in terms of cooking. I’m always challenging myself to try something new. This means that we’ve rarely eaten the same dinner twice in the past year and a half. It’s not easy, but I have a blast doing it (most of the time).

Last Wednesday, I prepared three meals.

I started out by placing all the ingredients I needed for those three recipes on top of my small buffet, and grouping them together by separate meals.

I started out by preheating the oven at 400F(205C). Then I got ready for the recipe that requires the most time:

Roast chicken with baby potatoes, garlic and spinach

What you’ll need (for 2 people)
+2 chicken thighs
+Light olive oil or grapeseed oil
+5 or 6 cloves of garlic
+100g of spinach
+200g Baby potatoes
+1 tbsp lemon juice
+Herbes de provence or Court Bouillon spices

How to prepare it:
+In a rectangular pan, spread out the spinach and splash it with either of the oils you’ve chosen (as shown in the picture)
+Add the garlic cloves (bared beforehand of their skin)
+Pat down the chicken thighs with a bit of oil, lemon juice and spices
+Put the chicken over the spinach
+Add the baby potatoes
+When the oven has reached 400F, put the dish in and cook for 1 hour. After 1 hour, check to make sure the chicken is well cooked. Depending on your oven, it may take another 20 minutes.

Serve with some brown rice noodles.

In my 3 meal plan, I had another dish that required cooking in the oven:

Brocoli, tomato, eggplant, sausage and cheese casserole

What you’ll need (for two people)
+2 sausages (choose your own type. mild italian, tomato and basil or honey dijon are all good for this recipe)
+250 grams of mild cheddar cheese
+1 good sized Broccoli
+1 medium sized eggplant
+1 can whole tomatoes (fresh is good too)
+ 4 cloves of garlic

Directions:

+Start out by thoroughly cleaning the broccoli and skinning the eggplant
+Cut them into bite sized pieces
+In a large pan (of any shape, I used a medium sized round one and a small rectangular one), set the broccoli, eggplant, garlic and tomatoes (with the juice)
+Cook for thirty minutes before checking to see if the vegetables are ready
+During that time, cook the sausage, at low heat, in a pan. This should take approx. 15-20 minutes if you bought them uncooked, 5-10 if they were precooked, but do keep an eye on them at all times and remember to turn them often.
+Grate the cheese
+Check the broccoli. Once you find that it is close to being ready (still crispy but manageable under the teeth) take the pan out of the oven, cover everything in cheese and put it back in. Leave it to cook for 5 minutes.
+ When the cheese has melted, remove the pans from the oven and add the sausage to the vegetables.

Brown rice noodles with shrimp, Bok choy, green beans and chili sauce

What you’ll need: (for 2 people)
+1/2 package of Brown Rice Noodles
+3 baby Bok choys
+Green beans (10 per person is good)
+30-40 small precooked shrimp or 20 big ones
+1 carrot
+Sweet chili Eggroll sauce (I use it on EVERYTHING)
+1 tsp Light olive oil or Grapeseed oil

Directions:
+Start out by heating the olive oil in a large pot(medium heat)
+Add the green beans, still cooking at low to medium heat (if the oil spits at you, turn it down)
+Cut the Bok Choy into bite sized pieces (including the leaves), add it to the pot
+Grate the carrot into the pot, stirring all the ingredients so they don’t stick to the bottom.
+When the green beans start softening, add the shrimp
+Start boiling some water for the noodles
+Once the water is boiling, follow the instructions on the package in order to know how long to leave the noodles in (2-3 minutes is pretty frequent)
+When the noodles are soft and ready, drain them in a colander
+Mix everything together and add some sweet chili eggroll sauce (1 tbsp per person should do the trick)

Tips on how to cook multiple meals at the same time:

Calculate how to use your downtime on one meal: The roasted chicken took less than 10 minutes to prepare but cooking it is long, so I had 1 hour to work on the other food.

Know what is done and what needs to be done. I’m still able to manage with just my head most of the time, but written lists can help a lot too.

Make meals that share common ingredients. We ate brown rice noodles with both the chicken and the stir fry. Nutritious and time-saving!

All told, this took me 1.5 hours in one afternoon and I had food ready for the rest of the week (including a couple of leftovers that we used for lunch)

The ingredients of a perfect day: simple things that make me happy

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After two heavy, rather personal posts (on traveling and death), I decided that this week’s piece would cover a lighter subject: everyday moments of joy.

Louise Hung wrote a fun piece for xojane.com, titled Is happy really that simple? 10 tiny things that make me ecstatic.

This inspired me to make my own list of simple things that I like to do and that are, to me, among the necessary elements of having a great day.
Like most people, I’m at my workplace 40 hours per week. My schedule is tightly packed with long work days from Wednesday to Saturday and although I love my job, I cherish my days off. When I’m not blogging for this site or for Untapped Cities, I love to fill them with the many activities that make life enjoyable: long walks to discover the city, meals at yummy restaurants, going to the movies, getting together with friends, painting and crafting…

Sunday is the day where I best like to indulge. Usually, I’m in no shape to be productive in any manner since I’m coming off of having been through 3 consecutive 11.5 hour shifts (with minimal sleep between), so here’s what I like to do:

Sleep in:
A classic way to enjoy your day off is to sleep a little later than usual. Of course, when your weekday alarm sets off at 5h30AM, sleeping in means a rising time of 8h30AM at the very latest. Still, it feels so nice to rise after the sun has.

Eat pastries for breakfast:
During the week, my first meal regularly consists of a dry bagel, orange juice and some Sesame snaps later on in the morning (I know, I know, this bad habit shall be changed soon). Come Sunday, I’m craving a good pancake or a gooey chocolate croissant. We are lucky to have a great bakery (Nigelle Café)at less than 3 minutes walk from our place and the walk to get there mostly takes us through alleyways. This means that we can walk to and from the place without changing out of our wrinkled sweats!

Paint my nails properly:
This is what my fingers look like during the week:

Now here is what they look like after a good moisturizing treatment and some pretty polish. A simple, superficial but pleasant thing to do!

Chill with my cats:
I do this because I love them and because if I don’t give them a bit of attention at least once a week, they’ll come to think of me only as that strange lady who serves the food (some particularly busy weeks I think my boyfriend sees me that way too).

Experiment with fun hairstyles:
For the last year and a half, I’ve been dying my hair. The new shade I’m trying out is hot pink. I also need some new dos that are cute but practical for workdays. When I get up to go to work, I don’t have time to think about pins, barrettes and elastics. I want to be able to do my hair with my eyes half open and a toothbrush hanging loosely off my lip.
Sunday is the day where I take care of my hair, make it nice and learn how to do those cute fishtail braids or those 40 ways to wear a headscarf, so that when I’m getting ready on Wednesday at dawn, the fingers will do all the work and the brains can stay asleep a bit longer.

Watch some corny TV.
Ah, the couch. Such a warm, lovely place to spend a few hours. What better a thing to do on this comfy piece of furniture, than to sit, cover yourself in a warm blanket and enjoy the pleasures of turning off your brain for 21 minutes. I’m a sucker for cheesy sitcoms and lately I’ve been watching Will and Grace (I got the box set for Christmas). Friends, Modern Family, 30 rock… Watching hilarious (and often witty) TV shows, is one of my favorite ways to relax.

Cook a nice meal:
I’ve said it before here, I like to cook. For the new year, we are trying to reduce the number of pre-prepared meals we eat, so I try to fit cooking into my busy schedule.

Discover some new music:
I’ve been working on learning Spanish lately (Fluenz software is the best!) and I like to get lost in the deepest realms of Youtube, trying to find some good music en español that does not sound like this (no offense to the fans). I know it’s out there and I’m very open-minded about music (I like electic things ranging from Britney to Buena Vista Social Club or the Black Keys, yes that was me lazily going through the Bs on Itunes).

Here’s one gem that I discovered last week: Los Super elegantes.

As for music in English, I learned about the band Temples last week, through NME music magazine’s 2013 watch list.

Read, read, read and read some more:
I’ve always been a big reader. When I was young, it was babysitter’s club books. Then I developed an obsession for magazines of all kinds and never went back. I rarely read books but I read dozens of articles every day. I guess I prefer the shorter format of storytelling.
I often go to the same websites everyday, as they always release new content, but I still love to find new sites (using Stumble Upon is a great way).
Here’s a list of great websites I discovered lately:

Daily Nibbles

The Jealous curator

Stars for streetlights

So that’s it, a list of simple pleasures that make life good on a regular basis. It may be nothing compared to visiting the Louvre, tasting a new dish on a side street of Sapporo or watching your favorite band live but as banal as these small things seem, they are just as important as the bigger, more extraordinary moments.

What are the little things in life that make you happy?