to Africa and back

Awhile ago (as in, I don’t even remember how long ago), my friend Regina (at least I think that’s who it was) recommended a recipe for a sweet potato stew to me. I don’t even remember why she thought to tell me about it. I’m just all sorts of forgetful these days, aren’t I?!

Anyway, the recipe for African Sweet Potato Stew with Red Beans has been in my to-make pile for awhile, and I thought it would be perfect for Meatless Monday this week. (Except that we ate it tonight, which is indeed Tuesday, but whatever. It’s the thought that counts.)

I’ll admit, I didn’t have super high hopes that Andrew would like this dish. It has beans in it, after all.

So you can imagine my surprise when he announced that, in fact, he did like it. According to him, the red beans “didn’t ruin in by making it too dry.”

In fact, “You can’t even taste them,” he said. Whatever works, right?

To go with it, I made Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day’s ‘Msemmen,’ which is an Algerian flatbread. I thought it would go nicely. It was super easy and absolutely amazing. Basically, you make their basic dough recipe, roll it out, spread a spice mixture on it as if it were pizza, then you roll the dough into a log and swirl it into a cinnamon roll shape before letting it rest for 20 minutes. After that, you simply roll it out again, which causes the spice mixture to create layers in the dough. Then, pan-fry in a skillet.

The stew is slightly sweet with just a bit of a kick. Serve with lime wedges and chopped peanuts!

(wo)man of steel

So last night, as we were lazing about in the couch (as we had most of the day did to Andrew’s snow day), Andrew remarked that he’d really like some apple crisp.

It was 8:15.

Ordinarily, I (and just about every other crisp-making person on the face of the planet), would brush this off with an ‘it’s too late’ excuse. While crisps aren’t terribly hard, the time it takes to peel a bunch of apples and then the hour to bake in the oven does add up.

However, I didn’t say that. I remembered a quick little recipe for individual apple crisps I’d seen in November’s Cooking Light. (And I also knew I had some leftover crisp topping stashed in the freezer from Thanksgiving’s dessert.)

I asked Andrew (my uber-picky, non-dessert eating hubby) if he really wanted one, (he did–little known fact: he might like apple crisp almost as much as angel food cake–gasp!) and then jumped off the couch to assemble my ingredients.

As I buzzed around the kitchen, Andrew said this–my ability to turn real apples into crisp in less than 15 minutes–was just ‘reaffirming that I’m superwoman.’

I love this man. (Have I mentioned I didn’t set foot outside our house yesterday? He took Hadrian out every. single. time.)

Anyway, back to the crisps:

The real time-saver, really, is the fact that they’re in individual ramekins, which drastically reduces the baking time. And while the recipe actually calls for crumbled oatmeal cookies as a quick topping, a tablespoon of my leftover crisp topping worked just fine.

I topped mine with half the amount of ginger frozen yogurt I had anticipated using. (I simply can’t eat pie or crisps without some sort of ice cream or whipped cream.)

Disclaimer: I hadn’t really intended on having dessert, but when my snow-blowing, dog-taking-out husband gave me an opportunity to amaze him with my superpowers in the kitchen AND feed him dessert at the same time, I just couldn’t refuse.

In other news, we watched a whopping SEVEN episodes of Dexter yesterday. Yup, we’re just your run-of-the-mill couch potatoes sometimes. Here’s to hoping today is at least slightly more productive than yesterday…

Christmas cookies

The other day, I had a baking ‘day’ with Mrs. Nye. We started at 10:30 a.m. and didn’t finish until 4:30 p.m., so it was quite an endeavor. We made three batches of cookies–traditional sugar cookies, soft sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies.

I actually don’t own a single Christmas-themed cookie cutter, and Mrs. Nye has enough to go around, so it worked out nicely. Growing up, one of my mom’s big things at Christmas was to make lots of Christmas cookies, but we almost never made cut-outs or decorated them. Her repertoire included those peanut butter-Hershey Kiss ones, the green cornflake/marshmallow ‘holly’ cookies, and some almondy-shortbread things covered in glaze and sprinkles. And chocolate-covered goodies. LOTS of things got dipped in chocolate over the years: pretzels, Oreos…she even made her own chocolate candies with different flavor extracts.

So anyway, Christmas cookie-decorating isn’t necessarily a childhood memory of mine, but it sure felt like it when I was with Mrs. Nye in her kitchen! I can’t believe I missed out on all that decorating fun.

And of course, the perfectionist in me had high expectations for how my finished cookies would look. I can’t say any of them could be mistaken for something purchased in a bakery, but I was pretty pleased with myself for using multiple colors and sugars, etc… And really, any aesthetic value is short-lived; they just end up eaten anyway.

Merry (almost) Christmas!