I'm still here!

I've been MIA from this blog for the entire month of January! But that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about food. In fact, lots of stuff has been going on since I've been on my blogging hiatus. Here are a few things:


Wedding Diet - My wedding is 5 months away and I'm trying to lose the 30 pounds I gained during first couple of years of my relationship with Carlos. I doubt I'm going to lose all that weight but I'm working on going to the gym, eating healthy snacks, reducing my portion sizes and eating healthy in general as much as I can. Reading Twitter and health magazines has been helping to motivate me and Carlos was willing to take on the role of being my personal trainer.

10 foods I'm avoiding - As part of my wedding diet, I'm avoiding these 10 foods until after the wedding. They are 1) Baked Goods 2) Pizza 3) Hot Dogs 4) Burgers (except for B.Good's veggie burger!) 5) French Fries 6) Soda (I don't drink it anyways but always good to avoid) 7) Sour Cream 8) Ice Cream 9) Breakfast Bacon & Sausage 10) Anything from a fast food restaurant chain. I don't really indulge in most of these on a regular basis (except for baked goods and sour cream) but crossing them off my list is easier for me than to try to portion control. Who can eat a few french fries when the restaurant gives you a huge pile?! Best not to order them in the first place.

 

Have I mentioned how much I love b.good and their fabulous veggie burgers?!

Whole Foods - I have been spending a lot of time at Whole Foods, eating lunches from their salad bar, picking up organic herbal teas, dark chocolates and different health supplements. I've been learning a lot about food from the book What to Eat by Marion Nestle and all things organic are on my mind lately. Whole Foods is a certified organic grocer and I'm wondering if I can change my grocery shopping habits and meal planning enough to be able to buy all my groceries from Whole Foods. I'm definitely not going to become a Healthy Living Blogger but I do want to makeover my diet and be healthier overall.

I'm also in love with Allegro's Nilla Nut Dream tea. Whole Foods serves it at their coffee bar but they don't sell the tea by the box. It's a wonderful black tea with hints of vanilla and hazelnut and none of the acridness that black tea is known for. Delicious with a splash of soy milk and some raw agave nectar.

Utilisima - My favorite new television channel! Unfortunately, I don't have Comcast's digital cable with the Spanish language package but my parents do. Whenever I visit them, I try to watch the channel with my mom. Utilisima is a Spanish-language channel full of shows about cooking, decorating and home improvement. It's wonderful! The cooking shows are my favorite and I'm getting a lot of recipe ideas from them while practicing and improving my Spanish. I'm trying to cook one Receta/Recipe from the Utilisima site each week. If you love to cook and speak Spanish fluently, watch their free recipe videos!

 

Losing my Freelance Food Writing Gig -  For all of 2011 and a few weeks of 2010, I was writing recipes and restaurant reviews for a local online newspaper. I lost the gig in the new year. The gig itself was quite a bit of work but it was also a lot of fun. I got to explore restaurants around the city and in the neighboring towns and write about it. I also pushed myself to come up with my own unique recipes, ones that were easy to make, didn't require a lot of fancy ingredients and would be of interest to locals. While it was really nice to have a freelance job, I'm glad for the extra free time I have now. It's also helping my waistline not baking so many desserts and also not visiting a new restaurant each week to review! The gig did help me pay for my wedding dress and for that I will be forever appreciative.

So what is there to expect from Thoughtful Eats from 2012? Fewer restaurant reviews but still some, absolutely no commissioned product reviews (I hated doing them anyways and big-time bloggers get the good stuff anyways), more healthy recipes, more about Latina cooking and more thoughts about cooking, eating and food in general. And perhaps I'll even write a blog post in Spanish! :: fingers crossed::

Christmas Eve Lunch and Christmas Dinner

Sometimes the holidays can be a bit tricky when you want to spend time with more than one family. I split the holiday by visiting my parents on Christmas Eve and spending Christmas evening with Carlos and his dad. For Christmas Eve, my Dad cooked up his traditional octopus. However, he didn't quite remember how to make it so it wasn't quite like it was in previous years. It was still delicious though.

My mother made this vegetable rice with carrots, peas, olives, capers and mushrooms. It was delicious! 

We had some fresh salad, Portuguese olives and bread with our meal. For dessert, it was pasteis de belem (egg custard cups) from the local Portuguese shop (not as good as mine though!). 

Since I didn't do any cooking for Christmas Eve, I spent a lot of time planning a Christmas dinner. Most of the recipes come from My Colombian Recipes, a blog I recently discovered and adore. Lots of great Latin dishes there to try!

Appetizers were garlic stuffed green olives (from a jar) and homemade Black bean dip. I served the dip with tortilla chips. The dip was amazing and we scraped the bowl clean. 

For the main meal, we had a fresh salad of sliced cucumbers and plum tomatoes along with chunks of avocado, dressed in lime juice, extra light olive oil, salt and pepper. I also made fried sweet plantains. Carlos isn't a big fan of sweet plantains cooked with sugar, so these were naturally sweet plantains that I just fried in canola oil. I've been experimenting with frying tostones so it was nice to try another way of frying plantains.

We also had Breaded Pork Cutlets. These were tricky because we didn't pound the meat enough so it didn't cook all the way through. I ended up baking them in the oven so they would be fully cooked. However, baking them made them soggy. Oh well. They tasted fine but I really wanted crispy cutlets.

For a starch, I had Arroz con Fideos (Rice with Noodles). I didn't cook the noodles enough. You are supposed to brown them in the owl so that they are more visible against the white rice. Oh well. Tasted fine though and it was a great side with the pork, salad and fried sweet plantains.

For dessert, it was Mango Flan. It didn't come out clean as I cut up some of the edges with a knife. I'm still learning how to make flans so I'm not quite there yet. This flan had Mango and sweetened condensed milk which made it different from other flans. It was like cheesecake in texture and flavor (almost). I have to say, this surprised me! It was absolutely delicious. I put a slice of lime on top just to make it look pretty. The caramel came out better than expected. I'm still very nervous about cooking caramel so it was nice to have a decent color on the flan from the caramel I made. The mango isn't very noticeable in the flavor though. It might be because I didn't have mangoes that were ripe enough or perhaps the sweetened condensed milk overpowered the mango flavor.

I hope you all had a wonderful Holiday!

Portobello Mushroom and Orzo Salad

You know what I absolutely hate? Going to the grocery store with a list of ingredients to buy for a recipe and not being able to find that one crucial item you need! In this case, I wanted to make Real Simple's Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms with Feta and Almonds and I couldn't find barley, which was the bulk of the stuffing. Grrr!!! I had already purchased the Portobello mushrooms and green onions from Wilson Farm so I decided to improvise. I swapped the barley for cooked orzo. I had more dried orzo at home that I knew what to do with. Instead of almonds, I used some grilled corn. The result. Fabulous! A delicious orzo salad on top of roasted mushrooms. Carlos doesn't like mushrooms but he looked a bit jealous when he saw me diving into this plate of deliciousness. He asked for some and he enjoyed it, mushrooms and all!

Ingredients:

4 Portobello Mushrooms, stems and gills removed and tops cleaned

extra light olive oil

1 cup of dried orzo

2 ears of corn, grilled

4 green onions

juice of half of lemon

1/3 cup of extra light olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

crumbled feta

This makes enough for two people.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. 

Clean the tops of your Portobello mushrooms, remove the stems and scrape out the gills with a spoon. Brush the tops with olive oil. Add to a baking sheet top-side-up and bake for 10 minutes. Then flip them over and bake for 10 more minutes. Remove from oven and set aside.

While the mushrooms are roasting in the oven, grilled your corn and bring a pot of water to a boil. Add the 1 cup of orzo and cook to package directions (about 6-8 minutes). Drain the water. Add the orzo to a bowl. 

Cut the corn off the ears and finely chop your green onions. Toss with the orzo. Add the lemon juice and olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and mix.

Plate two mushrooms, top-side-down, and spoon half of the orzo salad over the top. Sprinkle some feta all over and dig in!

Pizza Monkey Bread

I'm not sure where this recipe originated but the idea of making Pizza Monkeybread is genius! I wish I had thought of it. Monkeybread is a pull-apart bread which is generally sweet. What makes this a Pizza version is the pizza dough and the pepperoni and mozzarella cheese stuffing. Most other bloggers make their own dough and brush the stuffed pizza balls with garlic butter. I used a shortcut and made these with prepared frozen pizza dough. Also, I seasoned some light olive oil with garlic powder to make a garlic oil. I know this sounds ghetto but the garlic flavor is wonderful and I didn't see the need to make these with butter. Olive oil just seemed healthier. 

2 bags of frozen pizza dough

slices of pepperoni, cut in half

mozzarella cheese

extra light olive oil

garlic powder

marinara sauce

I could give you measurements but honestly I don't know! Just buy a ball of mozzarella cheese (not packed in water) and chop it up or buy a small bag of shredded mozzarella. Half of a regular sized bag of pre-sliced pepperoni should do. For the Marinara Sauce, I use Newman's Own. For the olive oil I used Bertolli's Extra Light Olive Oil and for every 1/2 cup of oil I did about 1 teaspoon of garlic powder. If you have garlic-infused oil, or want to infuse your own oil with fresh garlic, by all means go-ahead!

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. 

You'll need a bundt pan that's be greased with cooking spray or brushed with oil.

In a bowl, add some oil and garlic powder. Mix and set aside.

Break off pieces of the pizza dough into 1 inch chunks and roll into a ball with your hands. Create a well in the center with your thumbs and add 2 half slices of pepperoni and as much mozzarella as you can fit. Roll the ball and twist to close so you have a pizza dough ball and the filling is sealed in. 

Dip the ball in the garlic oil and roll until lightly coated. Add to the bottom of the bundt pan.

Keep repeating this over and over again until you run out of dough. Make sure each of the pizza balls are uniform in shape and in size in relation to the others. Place them evenly in the bundt pan making sure you are creating even layers of pizza balls.

Add the bundt pan to your oven and cook for 40 minutes or until golden brown. Heat up some marinara sauce and serve it with you pizza dough. You can either the monkeybread as is in the bundt ban. Or let it cool for 10-15 minutes, then carefully remove from the bundt pan and serve on a plate or platter. I'm usually too impatient for that and I like to eat the pizza monkeybread while hot.

The prep is a bit time consuming. Carlos helped me assemble this last one. He had fun with the pizza dough and it was a nice thing to do together as a couple. Hope you'll try this modified version of a food blogger favorite!