My Organic Life

My girlfriend Amy found Central City Co-Op here in Houston back in June. She suggested maybe we should investigate it together.  See, Amy is my better health cheerleader: she encourages, provides recipes and advice, and tries to get me to exercise.  Given my doctor’s recommendation that I go exclusively organic (fat chance but nice idea) and Amy’s persistence, I thought I’d give it a try.

To my surprise, our co-op experience has been a lot of fun – if for no other reason than Amy and I (and now Emily and Brooke too) are splitting shares and learning how to cook all sorts of nifty things we’d never have tried on our own (bok choi and beets for example).  We’ve had so much fun, we’ve joined the co-op! Between the four households, we split two medium shares and two fruit shares every week – that’s about $16 each for all organic and as much local as possible.  This is what one share of each looks like:

The First Week's Haul

So now that we have all of this produce, what to do with it?  Amy to the rescue (again)!  Amy loves Cooking Light, and now I do too.  Marrying what we have been getting at the co-op with recipes from CL, here are some recent favorites:

Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Green Mango (I use the green apple instead of mangos and it is lovely; it’s also great just to do the meat marinade and serve with saffron rice.)

Berry Cobbler with Sugared Almonds (This recipe is very forgiving.  I used frozen raspberries, and a combo of nectarines and plums – five in all since they are smaller - along with blueberries and it was lovely!)

As I mentioned, we’ve also tried new things.  Here is what I learned about bok choi (think Asian cabbage).  The stalks are edible but cook slower than the leafy greens so you should start them early and add the greens at the end.  And it is quite good sauteed in olive oil, ginger, garlic, and soy sauce.  I mixed mine with lightly steamed green beans and broccoli – tasty!

I haven’t made my beets yet (we have a bit of a backlog – our house hold is not used to the volume of fresh produce we are now experiencing!) but Amy recommended this recipe.

Will keep you posted on what more we learn as we expand our horizons (at least my horizons – Amy is already quite well-rounded). I will say that eating healthier and exercising more have so far netted extra pounds, not fewer but Rome wasn’t built in a day! (And I think that’s meds-driven and not lifestyle – I do what I can.)

More fun fruit and veggie recipes will follow, I’m sure.  And keep an eye out for a future post on fun fish recipes too.

Ugh!

You know how when you’ve done  something so many times you can do it on autopilot? That’s kind of how I am with making my Aunt Anne’s chocolate crinkles — I make them every year, and each time they get better tasting and easier to make.

Until now.

I have produced a batch of nasty, awful, greasy, entirely inedible cookies. All I can figure is, that when I was throwing the recipe together at 11:00 last night (it has to chill overnight before baking) I accidentally put in a full cup of oil, instead of a half. I have a vague recollection of thinking the batter looked a little different than usual, but persevered, nevertheless. Note to self: when something you have done many, many times suddenly seems  different, this is because it is.

And this is not the only cookie problem I have had today. I have a recipe for spritz cookies that I just love, but it’s a bit of a headache. (These would be the cookies that led to a notable incident of kitchen rage last fall.) This time,  they’re slightly under-mixed — my hand beater chose to die mid-prep — and a little undercooked, something for which I have only myself to blame. I don’t like hard cookies, and as a consequence, have an almost pathological fear of over-baking.

I may have to serve them anyway, though. I am having a few friends over to watch kiddie Christmas cartoons this afternoon, and without the vaguely doughy spritz cookies, I would have only two kinds of cookies to serve rather than the four I had planned — and two just doesn’t seem like enough variety.

I kind of want to run down to Hill’s Kitchen and buy a replacement mixer so I can re-make them… But maybe I should just ask Santa for a new, non-whack hand mixer?

Hmm.

Why Magazines Use Food Stylists

Because magazine covers need to look like this:

The delicious-looking Real Simple cover.

But when you make the same recipe at home, it looks more like this:

Still delicious, but less pretty.

The only modification I made to the recipe was using whole-wheat pasta, rather than white, and it still tasted great. If I were to make it again, I’d skip the instruction to put the cheese in while wilting the arugula. It didn’t impact the taste, but it made the mozzarella incredibly chewy — rather than light, like fresh mozz should be — as soon as the dish started to cool.