Cilantro-palooza

I get a little food happy on the weekends, since I usually pass through at least one farmer's market and start getting delusional about all the amazing meals I could make with pounds and pounds of organic vegetables.

This past week I took a cooking class, and the takeaway was that there is still so much that I have to learn, no matter how mad scientist I sometimes get in the kitchen. But, thanks in large part to the book project I've been working on, I've become quite aware of what's in food (get away from me, Yellow #5!) and am much more interested how things are prepared. Not that I was ever much a processed food kind of gal, but I've become much more mindful.

This weekend I ended up with way too much cilantro from the farmer's market. Seriously, what am supposed to do with all this? It's the size of my head. And it was only $1.50.

Since Saturday I have been trying to find things to do with it. I've mixed it in with salads and found a salmon recipe that uses it in the glaze. Then I remembered that years ago Tribe Hummus used to make a cilantro flavored hummus, which I loved. They've discontinued it, but I figured recreating it would be a good way to get rid of some of this cilantro.

Making hummus is relatively easy, but it involves constant tweaking. There's no need for a recipe (chick peas, blender, olive oil, and anything else you want to throw in there.) Pretty much every recipe online, though, will tell you to put in half a cup of lime juice into cilantro hummus, but I can assure you that is far too much.

This was my finished product. It's a little green, but in a good way. And it tastes better than anything Tribe ever put out. (Just don't spread it on graham crackers. That's the opposite of a good food pairing.)

It's important to make your own snack food, especially when this exists.

And...most important. According to the TED Talk below, cooking is what has helped the human brain evolve beyond that of other primates.

Sunday Funday Cooking: Quin-whaaa?

Breakfast is a tricky meal. So much of what the American diet consists of -- bagels, pastry, etc. -- is really bad for you. Egg and cheese sandwiches from the bodega are divine, but who needs all that grease? Cereals, even the healthy ones, are full of sugar and weirdly processed grains. And there is no way fruit has ever been able to hold me over until lunch.

So what to do?

This week I had a lot of quinoa lying around and the local fruit stand guys were selling strawberries three containers for five bucks, which is practically free.

Strawberries stay viable in the box for all of two days, so I had to do something with them, stat. I found this recipe on Pinterest and it seemed like a good place to start. I'm not the biggest fan of quinoa to begin with, but baking it seemed like a fun remix. So, a strawberry-banana-quinoa bake it was.

This is how it looked cut into little squares right out of the oven. Not too shabby.

A few tweaks, since I see recipes (and others rules in life) as mere guidelines:

1. Quinoa has no flavor to begin with (or at least I don't think so) so you cannot possibly put too much fruit into this dish. I used bananas and strawberries, but I think a berry medley would be amazing. Or, again, whatever your fruit guy has a special on. (Wait. What do you mean you don't have a fruit guy?)

2. The original recipe used chocolate chips, but it seemed an odd ingredient for a breakfast dish, so I just didn't use them. I don't think it made that much of a difference.

3. If you don't have maple syrup handy, no worries. You can't taste it. Almost every recipe for a quinoa bake includes it, and I'm not sure why.

4. This recipe says it should bake for 25 minutes, but you really need to bake for 50 to 60 minutes.

5. If you're gluten and/or dairy free, this is a pretty good breakfast option. And it's really filling. For one person this could last at least two days.

Sunday Funday Cooking: Whatever's Lying Around The House

So. Pancakes. It's a Sunday brunch staple, but I've never been the biggest fan of them. This past week, though, I was gifted a bag of whole wheat pancake mix from a fancy place here in Manhattan. They even used an old-timey font on the package!

I whipped them up this morning and two pancakes in I could tell it was total dreck. It seemed wasteful to toss all that batter, so I threw in some raisins and feta (because feta makes everything betta) and did what I always do with extra ingredients: I muffin-ized them.

Maybe I should have put the raisins and feta in first, but I like these little guys a lot better.

Later that same day I made more breakfast quiches, because they really made my life easier last week.

If anyone has insights -- Freudian, Jungian and otherwise -- as to why I seem to like making food the shape of flying saucers, I am all ears.

This strange pile of yellow and green is what happens when I have too many mangoes and cucumbers in the house. Most Pinterest recipes make mango cucumber salads with cilantro, but I only had scallions and they're practically the same thing, right?

I riffed off of this recipe, only squeezing fresh lime juice over the mix of cucumber, mango, scallion, feta and raisins. I also only had yellow rice and was not about to run out in the rain for white rice, simply for aesthestic purposes.

Over all, it's great right out of the bowl, but even better after being refrigerated for a few hours. The lime really pops.

A Few From The Weekend

What a great weekend. Gorgeous weather and lots to do.

First things first: I needed a new jogger bra for that half marathon that I ran on Sunday. I ventured for the first time ever into Lululemon in Union Square and picked up the Ta Ta Tamer (it's really called that) for $58. To test it, they make you jump on a trampoline. Utter genius.

Since a good jog bra is very hard to find, consider this a PSA -- and a ringing endorsement -- for the Ta Ta Tamer. Worth every penny.


These two were inseparable, as is their way on the weekends. I might as well not exist when they are up to their shenanigans.


I got a shrimp burrito from Paty's Taco. And it was right.


A nice sentiment.


Erin Duffy, author of Bond Girl, came to Sunday Funday book club. I was still very sore from running 13.1 miles just hours earlier, but she was hysterical.