Chicken and Rice and All things Nice

I'm always coming home late and getting hungry even later. I knew I had some chicken drumsticks, but wasn't sure what I would do with them. Everything in this recipe just seemed to follow suit. I grabbed the apples, onion, celery, tomato, green chili, garam masala, chili powder, cumin, tumeric, asafateida, ginger, garlic, dried coconut, chicken stock and rice... oh yeah. I seasoned the drumsticks, sauteed the onions, celery,green chile and apples in the ginger, garlic and spices, added the chicken stock and tomatoes, threw in some dried coconut, cooked my rice separately and 25 minutes later had one really tasty Indian dish.

Northside's Urban Gardens

I had the pleasure of spending a few hours in the Green Millennium Children's Garden and the Olde Allegheny Garden in Pittsburgh's Northside this morning. My friend Laura Winter has been tending the children's garden for the last fourteen years. Local kids from the neighborhood as young as 18 months get to come and work in the garden, digging up potatoes and worms, learning about the different varieties of plants and herbs, and even how to compost. There is a great mural for the community to admire, and everyone is welcome to stroll through and take a sniff as it reads on the sign at the Olde Allegheny Garden which is in a lot directly across the street from the children's garden. Plant varieties of all kinds populate the two plots, from edible flowers like nasturtiums and lavender to delicious herbs such as lemon balm and thyme and mint and oregano. The garden also hosts tomatoes and tomatillos, beans, squash, eggplant, sunflowers and a few less common species such as the elephant amaranth so called because it grows to resemble an elephant head and trunk and the Egyptian walking onion, so-called because it grows upward and then bends over to replant itself and then grows upward again and continues to bend and replant itself so it kind of ''walks'' around it's garden patch. There are also benches and rock paths strategically placed for the community to enjoy the garden and all it's wonders without trampling through and wreaking havoc. A giant rain barrel was also delivered today which will help to irrigate the garden for years to come. These two gardens are a perfect example of what can be done on empty lots in urban neighborhoods to not only beautify city blocks, but also get the community involved with positive and healthy opportunities.

Oaxacan Sabor

I've been hoarding a red Oaxacan mole for months now. It's so good, I didn't want it to disappear from my cooler. As if somehow knowing it was there, was as good as eating it. That idea is quickly realized to be a false statement as soon as it is prepared and the first bite taken. I love almost everything Oaxacan, and at the top of the list is the Oaxacan mole. This particular chunk was sent to me from one of my closest friends after a recent trip he made to that amazing Mexican state. To cook the mole paste, just thin it out in a little chicken broth and the citrus from an orange, occasionally adding a splash of water to thin it out more as it cooks down. I boil and shred the chicken and toss that in to the mole sauce. In the meantime I cook the rice in water and broth and make a tomato, onion and cilantro puree to add to the rice when it's ready. I also made a cabbage salad as a side dish, as well as some baked corn with a spicy chipotle finishing sauce. I will miss not having the mole in my refrigerator, but I will savour it's sweet, rich flavor for the rest of this evening. Que Sabor!

Bombay Breafast

This is one of the easiest and most flavorful breakfast dishes that I often make. I don't always make it with the kale, but today I did.

Just take a hot buttered pan, add a pinch each of cumin, tumeric, and chili powder, crack in your eggs, but don't scramble. Instead just break the yolks so it runs yellow over the whites of the eggs. Cook for a couple of minutes and then just flip the eggs over. The red and yellows from the spices really pop to make a beautiful palate of color and the aroma is so eye-opening, you will barely need your coffee. Today, I also cooked kale in chicken stock with garlic and onions as a bed for the Indian eggs. If you have these three spices on hand, which I highly recommend you do, you can make this in a matter of five minutes. It doesn't get any easier than this.

Penn Ave. Fish Market- The best place on Earth

So far in this blog, I've only written about the food that I buy and cook and eat at home, but I don't always eat at home and in fact about three or four days out of the week I drop into my favorite lunch place on the planet, Penn Avenue Fish Company! http://pennavefishcompany.com/)

Everything that's good about good food is served on every plate they put out. It's healthy, fresh, delicious and beautifully presented every time. Angela and Henry put a whole lot of love into what they do and it's obvious by the daily packed house at lunch that the people of Pittsburgh approve. I always feel better walking out of this place, than I did going in. PAFC is also the only place I buy my fresh fish. Every fish is bought whole and cut into steaks or filleted on the premises almost as a kind of show for the public to watch. They also sell whole fish, scallops, crabs, shrimp and anything seafood. PAFC should be part of Obama's heathcare reform!

(Note: PAFC photos were taken with an iPhone, so quality is not great)

Spring Pasta after a Summer Rain

This is just a pasta primavera. There is nothing sexy or exciting about it really. I just wanted to make something for dinner using the chopped and bagged vegetables that would otherwise probably go bad. I had bagged up half of a zucchini and a quarter of a yellow squash. I had a chunk of onion and the rest of the asparagus and the back of an eggplant wanting to be used. Leftover tomato went in, a third of a bell pepper, carrots and the basil I'd already pulled from my garden, but hadn't used. I poured in what was left in the carton of cream, added a little chicken stock and melted in a couple of cheeses to thicken it up. There was a nice summer rain this evening, reminiscent of spring showers, so the pasta primavera topped with a basil flower worked out just fine.

A New Hamburger In Town

I don't eat a lot of hamburgers, but I can't seem to get the idea of a new burger out of my thoughts. Not the traditional ketchup, mustard, lettuce and tomato burger that's available in almost every restaurant on every street in every town in America, but the unopened recipe book on burgers. The one that never really got published. I've made a near complete menu of burger ideas that will water almost anyone's mouth in concept and taste, and I haven't run out of ideas from there. There is really no limit with what you can do with ground meat, be it beef, lamb, pork, salmon, tuna, buffalo, kangaroo, or vegetarian and raw food burgers! I've had a lot of fun with a lot of these versions of hamburger concepts with two buns and a patty, but never once in the traditional sense. I plan to share a lot more of these ideas here on this blog, but for now, I'll just post this one for your senses.

The hamburger pictured here was an herbed lamb burger I made recently. I made an apple cole slaw and a chive sour cream sauce and placed the patty on a bed of baby spinach. This ain't your backyard burger.

Chicken and Eggplant Strata

I couldn't pass up the eggplant from the the Southside Farmers Market this afternoon, and I grabbed a beautiful bundle of radishes for my salad too. I had the chicken breast, the San Marzano canned whole tomatoes, the Italian scamorza cheese and the aged Piave, and of course I had the garlic, onions and basil on hand.

I boiled the chicken first in order to shred it with a fork once it was cooked and cooled. I sauteed the garlic and onions and added the

chicken in with those for a few minutes to absorb some of the flavorings, I then added the tomatoes which I mashed to chunks and poured a little wine in, then stewed for a good 30-40 minutes into a nice sauce. I cut the eggplant into 1/4 inch slices or so and when the sauce was nice and mixed, I placed some sauce at the bottom of a baking dish and then layered the eggplant, chicken and tomato sauce and the scamorza cheese. I also layered in some fresh basil and shaved the Piave cheese over top. I placed the

baking dish into the pre-heated 350 degree oven and cooked for another 25minutes.

In the meantime I made a fresh bibb and basil salad with radishes, tomatoes, purple onion, green pepper and lemon cucumbers which look like lemons, but taste like cucumbers. I whisked up a simple olive oil, white wine vinager, mustard, honey, ginger and garlic dressing. A little salt and pepper to taste and it's finished.

This was a great salad that was simple to make and a great meal that stacks beautifully and looks great on the plate. Also, I love having leftovers of baked Italian dishes. Somehow the flavors just concentrate that much more over night and the re-heated dinners are just as delicious if not better. This is also a great lasagna style dish that omits noodles for anyone watching their carbohydrate intake and for those of you who are not red meat eaters.

Potatoes Under A Midnight Moon

I woke up early this morning hungry for potatoes. I grabbed some asparagus and shitake mushrooms from out of my fridge, some garlic off the counter and chopped everything including the potatoes into small 'bite-sized' pieces. I melted some Amish butter in a skillet and added the garlic and potatoes. After about 10-12 minutes, I added the onion and continued to stir every once in awhile for another 6-10. I then added the asparagus and mushrooms for a final 3-5 minutes. This would have been a fine breakfast just like this, but the next ingredient made it something altogether addictive. Midnight Moon is a California goat cheese that has an intense nutty taste that is... magical! This might be the best cheese I've ever put between my lips. It's like a first kiss with every bite. Wow! I just wowed breakfast potatoes!

The Blight of the Tomato

There is a rampant outbreak of tomato blight throughout the northeast and mid-atlantic this summer. The tomato blight is a strain of fungus that caused the great potato famine of Ireland in the late 1800's. The strains are different, but the illness can jump from one species to the other. The hot weather and sun help slow down or sometimes stop the fungus from spreading, but unfortunately for most of the farmers and gardeners in this region, the weather isn't forecast to cooperate.

Ghetto Grown

Braddock Farms is an urban farm spread across eight city lots on the edge of the severely dilapidated borough of Braddock. Outside of the farm is a virtual wasteland. The streets are populated only sporadically, an ailing hospital is dying a few blocks away, a Dollar General is the only other market in the area, and the rest is a whole lot of nothing but abandoned steel mills and the tears of history. The low income housing and the people who live there are clear on the other side of the main drag, a good eight or nine city blocks from the farm. I was told by one of the farm workers that the residents who are in the area don't often make it to the farmers market that is there for their benefit, primarily because the borough has set strict rules on the farm's market hours, from 2:30-5:00PM. "A lot of these people work and just can't make it down on time" he said.

The farm is run in part by a non profit organization called Grow Pittsburgh (www.growpittsburgh.org), which is largely modeled after a bigger NPO called Bioneers (www.bioneers.org). This summer, the farm was also tended to by six local urban youths who did so as paid interns. The Braddock Farms urban farming project is in it's third season and making a valiant effort. Aside from the blight of some of the tomatoes this year, all of the other crops seem to be doing very well. There are melons, different varieties of greens, beans, and berries, there is a peach tree, there are peppers, herbs of all kinds, radishes, sunflowers and quite a few more options growing on the farm. I would love to see this happening in all of the urban neighborhoods around the city that really don't have the market options of the more affluent neighborhoods. For now it is a small oasis on the edge of a slum that with a little luck and a lot of love hopefully won't turn out to be just another ghetto mirage.

Simple Swordfish

I was pretty exhausted by the time I got home this evening, but I'd had the swordfish from PAFC (http://pennavefishcompany.com/) in the fridge for two days and didn't want it to go to waste. Besides, I had a great recipe in mind since the beginning of the weekend. Using the mint I'd bought at the farmers market on Saturday and the basil from my herb garden on the deck, I whisked up a very simple olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, lemon and herb dressing to coat the swordfish steak and then simply pan cooked it about three minutes on each side until just cooked through. So easy, so healthy, so good. I added a little side of tabbouleh I bought at the local Lebanese market and cut fresh lemons to squeeze onto my plate. I almost stuffed my face with a slice of greasy pizza in the South Side, and I know I'd have felt a lot worse right now. Healthy eating is so fun and so simple with just a few minutes of preparation. And, I am completely rejuvenated. "Mens sana in corpore sano," a sound mind in a sound body.

Kefalotyri Breakfast

I picked up some kefalotyri cheese from Stamooli's Market this past weekend and thought I'd use it in a baked egg breakfast this morning. I sliced some zucchini and yellow squash, chopped some onion and fresh peppermint I purchased at the Saturday Farmers Market. I sauteed the chopped onion to translucency while steaming the zucchini and squash in a separate pot. I preheated the oven to 350 degrees. When the vegetables were finished steaming, I added them to the onions and sauteed with the peppermint for five more minutes or so. I whisked two eggs with a pinch of nutmeg, salt, pepper and the kefalotyri cheese. I put the sauteed vegetables into a baking dish and poured the egg and cheese batter over them, then baked for twenty minutes...

This is a great baked egg dish. You can be really creative with the ingredients and the pie-like appearance of the dish. This baked kefalotyri dish was all about flavor though. The sweet evergreen taste of the nutmeg really opens up in your mouth with the salty nutty taste of the kefalotyri. Then add the mint into the mix and it's really delicious. The lightly browned eggs with the green zucchini and yellow squash really pop out nicely in color too. I will definitely make this again.

I am that I eat

A friend suggested I start writing blog content for other people as a secondary income of sorts. Although he did tell me it wouldn't be lucrative in the beginning, it would be fun and had potential to grow if people liked what I wrote and sent traffic my way. I have never posted a blog, maintained a blog, followed a blog, or even returned to a blog I have taken the time to browse or read. I am not a blogger and never really understood the concept until recently. I thought about my friends idea, but with my lack of experience and without the nerve and verve to author a blog for award, I have decided a little practice of the craft was in order.

This blog is the start of something new. I intend to blog a great deal on my diet, as the blog title suggests, believing it ought to be personal, descriptive, genuine and straight from the horses mouth so to speak without necessarily being kosher, if you catch my drift.

I love to cook and I love to eat and I love to photograph what I cook and eat, so I hope to accompany most of my writing content with great images as well. I often research recipes, but never follow them with any rigor and prefer to "method" cook with my eyes and my ears and my nose and of course with my teeth, my tongue and my tummy. Most of what I cook and eat is off the cuff and based on whatever I have in my ice box. I do love to grocery shop, particularly at farmers markets and the produce and meat markets in the Strip District here in the city of Pittsburgh.

As the blog title may also suggest, albeit metaphorically, I am that I eat will also be about everything I "consume" or experience in my daily life as I am living it. Everything I see and hear and touch and smell and even think or dream about, I hope to put down into this blog. Not only as a record for my own benefit, but as a sort of menu that you too may want to savour.

Bon Appetite!