Vanilla Peach Smoothie

After my sad smoothie semi-fail a couple of months ago, I decided that it was time to return to the world of smoothies. They are too delicious to completely abandon, and I was determined to get things right. Unfortunately, our blender has decided that it no longer wishes to blend things. Rather, it will slice things up for a bit and then just swirl liquid around for a while. But the actual mixing and puréeing that is necessary for a smoothie to be smooth? Not so much.

Then the hubs' parents sent us a gift. It was an immersion blender. And a New York Times article about how immersion blenders can be deadly that quoted people whose fingers can be severely cut up by accidentally touching the blades.

Thanks?

That's the thing about my in-laws. They don't just send gifts with a bow and a sweet card. That's too simple. No, they send gifts, sometimes slightly odd ones, and usually accompanying them are alarming notes, cryptic poems, and, this time, newspaper clippings warning us how the present we have received has the potential to make us lose our fingers.

Thanks!

Feeling a bit frightened but also intrigued, I decided that this was the perfect instrument to test out my next smoothie. I found a recipe for a vanilla peach smoothie in one of our cookbooks, Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything: The Basics." There are a lot of good, simple recipes in this book, and I will definitely use it as a reference for future meals. For the meantime, however, I was focused on the smoothies.

To make this one, I halved the original recipe. Here's what I needed:

*1 cup yogurt (preferably plain-- I used Greek yogurt)
*1/4 cup orange juice
*1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
*1/2 frozen banana (I used 1/2 of a regular banana)
*1 cup unsweetened frozen peaches

I put everything in our blending cup, leaving the peaches and banana for last. Since I used an immersion blender, I'm not sure how important this ended up being, but for a regular blender, you'll want the liquid on the bottom.

If the mixture is getting stuck, you can add more orange juice. I ran into the slight problem of the peaches getting pushed down to the bottom and not getting sliced by the blades, but some nudging helped move them along, and soon enough everything was finely mixed together.

That's it! Without a doubt, this was a smoothie success. The fruit was fully blended, no fingers were lost in the process, and it tasted delicious. The only downside is that by using the accompanying blending cup, we limited our serving size to one glass. This worked fine for me, but for making large batches, I'm not sure how I would use the immersion blender. Maybe in a large pitcher?

Either way, this smoothie recipe worked well for us, and I definitely hope to make it again. The warmer months are a good times for fruity drinks, but I think this would work well at any time of year for a snack or filling beverage. Enjoy!

Spicy Vegetarian Chili

When the temperature drops outside and the snowflakes start to fall, it feels so nice to cozy up inside and enjoy some warm comfort food. For me, this is the perfect time to make chili. It's filling, nutritious, and oh-so-delicious. A few months ago, the hubs and I found a great vegetarian chili recipe and have been making it pretty often. I found the original recipe online (here) but have made a few tweaks to suit my tastes.

Here we go:

*1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
*3 gloves garlic, minced
*1 teaspoon chili powder
*1 teaspoon ground cumin
*1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
*1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
*1 1/2 teaspoons honey
*1 can black beans (with liquid)
*1 can diced tomatoes (with liquid)
*1/2 bell pepper, chopped
*1 carrot, chopped
*1 cup corn
*ground beef substitute (I like Trader Joe's brand)

1. In a large pot, heat the oil over medium heat and sauté the garlic. Add the beef substitute, making sure to break it up so it crumbles.

2. Toss in half of the chili powder (1/2 teaspoon), half of the cumin (1/2 teaspoon), half of the cayenne pepper (1/2 teaspoon), and the cinnamon (1/8 teaspoon). Add the honey, beans, tomatoes, pepper, carrots, and corn. Give it all a good stir to mix up the ingredients.

3. Cook for 45 minutes, making sure to stir every now and again.

4. Add the remaining chili powder, cumin, and cayenne pepper, and let everything cook for another 15 minutes.

5. To serve, just scoop into bowls. Add sour cream, cilantro, and grated cheese if you'd like. Serves four.

The end result is spicy, but not too much. I actually sometimes add more cayenne for more heat, but that's up to you. If you'd like to make a non-vegetarian version, just cook some ground beef and and add it to your vegetable mixture.

Enjoy!

Earl Grey Carrot Muffins

The time has come for another recipe! One of my New Year's resolutions was to make something from every cookbook the hubs and I own. I decided to start with one of the books that I had never even opened before. The hubs and I have a collection of vegan cookbooks, partly because I used to be vegan (now just vegetarian) and partly because the hubs subscribes to a book service that sends him random books every month or so. The end result is several vegan cookbooks that are, shall we say, underloved.

Vegan recipes have the potential to be kind of gross. Tofu can be boring after a while, and if I'm being honest, I think that fake cheese tastes like plastic. However, there are lots of great vegan and vegetarian recipes that taste fresh and flavorful, and even my meat-loving husband agrees that they are satisfying and delicious. Since I don't like to cook with meat and can't stand the smell of seafood, we end up cooking vegetarian meals about 98% of the time in our house. I was definitely up for the challenge of finding a new vegan dish to experiment with.

Maybe it was the cold air outside or my desire to have the apartment smell delicious when the hubs came home from his week away in LA, but I decided to bake muffins from Cook, Eat, Thrive: Vegan Recipes from Everyday to Exotic. This is a great cookbook that has a lot of international dishes, from empanadas to cous cous to brioche. I bookmarked a lot of recipes to go back to, but I decided to kick off this set of recipes with muffins. The recipe for Earl Grey carrot muffins sounded intriguing and relatively simple, and since I love Earl Grey as a beverage, I wanted to see how they would turn out when put in a muffin.

*1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
*1 teaspoon Earl Grey tea (powder form- crush in a mortar & pestle or in a coffee grinder)
*1 teaspoon baking powder
*1/2 teaspoon baking soda
*1/4 teaspoon sea salt
*1 cup sugar
*1 cup grated carrots
*1/2 cup water
*1/2 cup vegetable oil

This recipe was simple enough. I heated the oven to 350 and quickly mixed all of the ingredients together. Technically, the book says to separate the ingredients across two bowls, but that has never made sense to me, so I put it all in one large mixing bowl.

I mixed the ingredients just long enough to get rid of any dry clumps and then promptly scooped the mixture into a muffin tin lined with baking cups. The recipe is supposed to yield 12 muffins, but I think I overfilled the muffin cups because I only had enough for 10. Close enough!

After the letting the muffins bake for 20-25 minutes, they were done! These turned out pretty well, and I loved their Earl Grey fragrance. These were also unexpectedly sweet, but this might be because I used sugar in the raw rather than white sugar. The end result was delicious! My only complaint was that the bottom of the baking cups were pretty oily, which I assume was from the vegetable oil. I don't typically like to bake with vegetable oil but since this was a vegan recipe, I couldn't use eggs. If I were to use this recipe again, I think I would substitute the eggs for the oil, but otherwise, I thought these muffins were pretty tasty as is. Yum!

Have any of you tried vegan baking before? What did you think of it?

Smoothie Semi-Fail

As part of my efforts to cook more and kick ass in the kitchen, I decided to try making a kale smoothie since apparently kale is the new wonderfood and will basically keep us alive forever. My sister makes great smoothies, but when I asked her how she puts together her delicious kale smoothies, she just sent a vague e-mail saying, "I use Greek plain yogurt, peanut butter, and bananas." That sounded easy enough, but I still didn't know the proportions to use.

After searching the internet, I figured I could make something that somewhat resembled her smoothies. I couldn't find fresh kale in the grocery store, so I settled on frozen chopped kale. This may have been my first mistake.

This is what I originally based my smoothie recipe on:

*2 cups kale (I just chopped the 10 oz. block of frozen kale in half and figured that was enough)
*1 sliced banana
*1/4 cup milk
*2 tbsp nonfat Greek yogurt
*1 tbsp honey
*1 tbsp peanut butter

I combined all of this in our blender and let it spin around for a while to mix up all of the ingredients. However, this resulted in a very thick, goopy smoothie that had huge flecks of kale in it and was difficult to drink. So to fix it, I poured in some more milk and orange juice to give it more liquid. That definitely helped the consistency, but I still ended up with large pieces of kale in my drink, which I wasn't anticipating and didn't particularly like.

Overall, it still tasted good, but I would have liked a smoother smoothie. Next time I'll go with a different recipe and perhaps use fresh kale to see if I end up with a better result. At least I tried! :) Any smoothie suggestions for next time around?