Searching for the Mexican Within

I am really white. Not just white, but part British and so fair-skinned as to be prone to sun poisoning. Normally this might not be something the average white person would even bring up, but I am a distinct minority in my mother's family. Within that particular family, I have three Honduran sisters, one El Savadoran sister, 34 mostly Mexican sisters and brothers, and nieces and nephews who are black/Hispanic, white/Hispanic, El Salvadoran, and Laotian/Hispanic. I think that covers it. I am the odd-looking blonde with freckles. If you've ever seen one of our full family photos, you may have noticed me. And wondered what I was doing in the picture...

The only culinary heritage I get from my dad's family, the red-headed British side, comes down to my late grandmother's fruit trifle. Grandma Peggy died before I could ever ask her to teach me how to make it, and my Aunt Susie, Grandma's only daughter, claims to not have Grandma's recipe. The stuff is so good it will make your eyes roll back in your head.

When it comes down to comfort food, I lean towards Mexican. I can only assume this is because it is my mother's children who are the first to be there to help me when I need it. I have been working on my salsa recipe for months now, and have yet to get it exactly right. After all, I'm just a white girl, what do you expect?

But I have desperately needed a Mexican snack food for those desperate times. You know, like when I have PMS. Where most Southern women might appease their menstrual irritations with potato chips and french onion dip, I crave tortilla chips and salsa. I have long since sworn off store-bought salsa, and it has now been three years since I lived within walking distance of a Mexican restaurant (where I would often walk in with empty plastic containers and ask for fill-ups). My last salsa attempt was this past weekend, when I again got only mediocre results. This is becoming tiresome.

Yesterday, for the fourth time in a week, I peeked into the paper bag on the kitchen counter to check the status on the ripening of my avocados. Eureka. They were FINALLY soft. Excited, I pulled down The Grit Cookbook, fairly sure I could get satisfying results from their guacamole recipe. I've eaten at The Grit, a fun local vegetarian restaurant, countless times, and while their guacamole recipe was developed by a bunch of hipster-type white guys, it has never disappointed me.

Not only was the recipe easy, but the guac came out fabulously. So well, in fact, that The Carnivore wolfed down half of it while watching American Idol last night. (For the record, Taylor and Paris were my favorites from this episode.)

GRIT GUACAMOLE

• 4 1/2 cups peeled, cored and mashed ripe avocado (I used 8 avocados)
• 1/3 cup sour cream
• freshly squeezed juice of 1/2 lemon or 1 lime (I used lemon)
• 2 Tbs Grit Salsa (this was the mediocre recipe I tried this weekend, but it worked fine when using such a small amount - any salsa would do here)
• 1 cup chopped ripe tomatoes, slightly drained (I used the outer flesh only of one tomato)
• 1/3 cup very finely minced red onion
• 1 tsp salt (I used kosher)
• 1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1/8 tsp granulated garlic

1. Stir ingredients until fully combined.
2. Serve well chilled

New (Old) Cookbooks

Just went to Goodwill and scored four new cookbooks.

• California Culinary Academy: Italian Cooking (1987)
• The New York Times International Cookbook (1971)
• Southern Living: The Vegetables Cookbook (1975)
• Southern Living: The Creole Cookbook (1976)

I can't decide which one I'm most excited about. I am most likely to cook recipes from the Italian Cookbook (which is fairly current), though the NYT cookbook is extremely cool, with recipes from countries that have changed names a few times already since this book was published.

The real fun though was in the Vegetables Cookbook. This was from before Southern Living started putting out the annual cookbooks that mom, a few of my sisters and I all collect. I have ridiculous amounts of fun reading the titles of recipes from the fifties, sixties and seventies. The pictures in this particular book are seriously dated, and the recipes are scary bad. My favorites are the "vegetable" recipes that call for 3 strips of bacon each. (shuddering)

A short list of recipes that I will never, ever, in a million years cook:

• Scalloped dandelions (never a good idea)
• Spinach ring (make it stop)
• Lima bean-olive casserole (need I say more?)
• Frozen peas in cream (OMG - thats too nasty to even talk about)
• Garbanzo bean surprise (I'm not eating anything with "surprise" in the name)
• Carrot loaf (make it stop)
• Spiced fiddleheads (what the?)

This Is Not Your Mother's Tofu

I rarely will cook with tofu. For the most part, it just distresses me. And there was that soup with cubed tofu incident from my childhood...

Trapped somewhere between moderate conservatism and liberal vegetarianism, I can sometimes have problems finding my niche. I eat a diet low in dairy products and high in vegetables and whole grains (so far, so good). I eat very little in the way of processed foods, yet can wolf down homemade desserts like they're going out of style. I won't eat red meat or chicken, but will eat seafood once a week. I usually vote Republican, but I am rabid about recycling. I prefer organic whole foods, but have no problem with tax cuts for the wealthy. Pigeonhole me if you can.

I love NPR, and I believe energy efficiency should be mandated by government legislation, but I am scared of tofu. You see, its a hippie food and I am a conservative Christian. And I have no problem picking and choosing my beliefs to suit my tastes.

Tofu may frighten me, but I've never met a poblano recipe that I didn't like. So when I ran across a recipe I had copied two years ago (or so) from Real Simple magazine for Stuffed Poblanos, I tried not to wince at the prominence of tofu in the ingredient list. I stared warily at the recipe every time I made our menu over the past few weeks, but I just couldn't bring myself to give it a shot. Then I decided to make Shrimp Quesadillas for Saturday, and I needed a side dish. Since we'd already had fresh salsa, and since my avocados will never get ripe enough for me to make guacamole, I felt I was getting word from on high that it was time to conquer my fears and become a True Granola Person.

Saturday morning's recipes were full of success (hummus, veggie pita wraps, tabbouli, banana chocolate chip muffins), so my confidence level was fairly high when I began working on the stuffed peppers for dinner. I put my favorite Morphine album on the stereo, made some iced coffee, and mentally prepared myself. Then I gathered my ingredients and re-read the recipe. It still seemed like a dicey proposition. I got nervous again while I mashed up the tofu, I'm not crazy about chopped tomatoes, and I found it to be really difficult to cut slits into the peppers and pry out all the seeds without massacring the peppers. I was sure the whole thing was doomed.

I tasted the filling after I mixed everything together and, surprise of all surprises, I loved it. Great texture, full flavor, very un-tofu-like. Even more surprising was that The Carnivore walked by while I was fighting with the pepper seeds and he poked a finger into the bowl of filling and made some sort of approving sound. I had carefully hidden the package of tofu in the refrigerator for two days so he wouldn't have any preconceived notions about the dish before trying it, and I think I might have even winced when he asked what was in the stuffing, but I fessed up and he looked surprised, tried another bite, and still deemed it great. Once it was all said and done, the Stuffed Poblanos took the award for the night, far overshadowing the shrimp quesadillas (not an easy feat).

I am a little less fearful of tofu now. But I'm still not going to vote for Hillary. Let's not take this new hippie food open-mindedness too far.

STUFFED POBLANOS

• 4 large poblano chiles
• 14-oz package of soft tofu
• 1 minced garlic clove
• 1 finely chopped onion (Yolie, if you pulverize the onion, you can get the sharp flavor without having to sink your teeth into onion chunks)
• 3 cups rice (I used brown rice)
• 1 chopped tomato (I scooped out and discarded the juicy inner part and only used the outer rim of the tomato)
• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 2 Tbs chopped fresh parsley
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 1 cup shredded white cheddar (I used Pepper Jack cheese instead)

1. Cut a slit lengthwise down the sides of the peppers, while standing on one foot and holding your mouth just right. Remove and discard the seeds.
2. Mash the tofu in a large bowl.
3. Add garlic, onion, rice, tomato, olive oil, parsley and salt to the tofu and mix well.
4. Stuff the peppers with the tofu filling and bake at 450 degrees for 30 minutes.
5. Top each pepper with 1/4 of the cheese and continue baking until the cheese melts, about 3 minutes more.

Priorities

Too busy cooking to blog about the cooking. Made 18 vastly different dishes over the past seven days, 9 of them new recipes. I am tired, but full. And fat. My little taste-tester isn't complaining (though this picture is nearly a year old - taken during my smoothie-perfecting phase). Will find time this week to at least publish the recipe for the surprise hit of the week: Stuffed Poblanos.

I spent this afternoon testing out luncheon recipes, after spending Saturday morning working on picnic recipes. I am becoming manic. I will work on a single dish ad nauseum, over a period of weeks, until it is absolutely perfect. By then though, I'm often sick to death of it. I've already gone through the fudge phase (currently discouraged and taking a break on that one), and I'm still smack dab in the middle of a salsa phase. Speaking of which, if anyone has The Perfect Salsa Recipe, I would appreciate it if you would share.

This is getting out of hand. And expensive. Must find way to make money doing this. I learned to enjoy cooking as a way of being super-efficient (after all, I wouldn't resent HAVING to cook if I actually LOVED to cook - as far as I'm concerned, everything comes down to one's state of mind). Now if I could only become Superwoman and discover a way to cook to eat, to have fun, AND to pay the bills. Have a new goal now. Will add it to the list...

Public Love Letter

Yesterday, I made one of my quarterly trips to Earth Fare, my favorite grocery store in the world next to Trader Joe's (which, by the way, will be opening a store in Atlanta soon - and not a moment too soon either: their prices are WAY better than Whole Foods and Earth Fare, but until now I have only seen them in California). I am such a food nerd.

I gazed longingly at the cooking magazines while I waited in the checkout line. The beauty of these liberal, natural food stores is that they have a fantastic variety of food and environmental publications to choose from. This is not Walmart. Money is entirely too tight right now for me to indulge my propensity for expensive gourmet mags, so I suffered quietly (not an easy feat - I am Cindy's daughter, after all). I ALWAYS want to read more about cooking, but I settle for whatever I can find at yard sales. I am cheap. Its okay - I can admit it.

The magazine that caught my eye the most was the Spring/Summer issue of The Best of Fine Cooking Fresh. The subheadline bragged of "a new collection of more than 100 delicious vegetable recipes." I actually salivated. In the checkout line. It was most embarassing, especially with Odd Toddler screeching that he wanted a plantain. (No, he's not smart enough to know what a plantain is - he just thought they were cute little baby bananas).

The cover was gorgeous, a beautiful shade of springtime green (a welcome sight after our long, arduous Southern winter), featuring a plate piled high with fettucine primavera. I vowed that I would check their website when I got home. Imagine my distress when the website did nothing more than advertise this particular special issue. There were NO recipes online. Very, very frustrating.

And then...

Mom called me late in the day to say that Mrs. Carr, my favorite teacher that I never had the pleasure of actually having as a teacher, had sent a cooking magazine home with the kids for me. Yep. You guessed it. SHE SENT THE VERY SAME MAGAZINE THAT I HAD BEEN POUTING ABOUT EARLIER THAT VERY SAME DAY. I already thought she was a cool lady, but this takes the cake. I mean, hey, this was more thoughtful than anything my sweet carnivorous husband had done for me lately.

And so, this particular blog entry is to say, where everyone can hear me, "Mrs. Carr, you are so cool!" Yes, cool enough that I, Sheriff of the Punctuation Police, used an exclamation point.

Pasta with Asparagus, Blue Cheese and Roasted Shallots

I have been trying a LOT of new recipes lately. For a long time, I tried to stick with only two new recipes a week, but tax time stresses me out and cooking is the outlet for my irritation. Thusly, we have been enjoying a new recipe nearly every day for the past couple of weeks. I have been cooking mostly from Cooking Light magazine, but I got bored with that when I made last week's menu (yes, I make a weekly menu - I just can't help it), and I climbed up on the stepladder and started pulling cookbooks down from the shelves in the kitchen.

I perused a few cookbooks and finally started thumbing through the 2001 Bon Appetit annual recipe compendium. Most of the recipes were entirely too complex to bother with for a weeknight meal, and the vast majority of them were so rich as to possibly send us to a cardiologist. With my lip curled, I went to slam the book shut and move on to something a little more, shall we say, lowbrow, when my eye caught on a recipe title that had all the makings of a food love fest: Farfalle with Asparagus, Roasted Shallots and Blue Cheese.

Now we still had a disconnect between this particular cookbook and my own cooking style. As a general rule, I like to stay on the moral high ground side of healthy (although I have been known to sin as long as the unhealthy ingredients are as unprocessed as possible). And then there's The Money Issue. I am an accountant. I just CAN'T HELP doing job costing comparisons when cooking. I know, I know, this kind of behavior can seriously take the fun out of things (just ask my husband), but we are on a particularly stingily tight budget right now, and we can't exactly afford to be extravagant with our food costs.

But this recipe REALLY sounded fantastic. So I threw caution to the wind. Just call me Wild Woman.

Well, I say I threw caution to the wind, but in fact I mentally added up the ingredients in my head as I tossed them into the shopping cart, wincing with each purchase. Let's see, 24 shallots at roughly 55 cents apiece, plus 1 pound blue cheese.... Oy. This hurt. I consoled myself by thinking about all those poor saps who eat most meals out at restaurants and end up dropping loads of cash on single-serving meals. After all, total cost for this recipe was around $25. Cost per serving came to around $5.00. Clearly time to stop the whining. (This accounting degree really comes in handy sometimes).

For real though, this dish was so amazingly wonderful that had I died right after dinner, I would have left this world happy (fat, but happy). The blue cheese added the perfect pungency, without being overpowering, and the creaminess was to die for. Next time though, I will cut the recipe in half. This made about six servings, and ended up lasting all weekend (even mom had it for three meals). It is without a doubt best the first night though, while the cheese is still sticky and runny.

And a note to people with blue cheese aversions: real blue cheese is NOTHING like those crappy store-bought blue cheese salad dressings. Salad dressing should be made with oil and vinegar, and should always be homemade (The Carnivore is not yet convinced of this fact - notice the vast quantity of pre-packaged salad dressings in the refrigerator). Blue cheese is a rich, crumbly, pungent but not bitter, cheese that can be purchased in the deli section of most supermarkets. There are different varieties of blue cheese, but gorgonzola is my hands-down favorite.

*****

FARFALLE with ASPARAGUS, ROASTED SHALLOTS and BLUE CHEESE (serves 4 to 6, from The Flavors of Bon Appetit, 2001)

• 1 1/2 lbs medium shallots (about 24), peeled and halved lengthwise
• 4 Tbs olive oil
• 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs, made from French bread (I used whole wheat bread - sue me. To make breadcrumbs: put a few slices of bread in the oven at about 200 degrees for an hour or so, until very dry. Pulse in food processor until coarsely ground.)
• 1 1/2 lbs farfalle (bow-tie) pasta
• 2 lbs thin asparagus, trimmed and cut diagonally into 1 1/2-inch pieces)
• 1 pound creamy blue cheese (I used gorgonzola), cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1. Toss shallots with 2 Tbs olive oil on baking sheet; spread in single layer. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake at 375 degrees until tender and golden brown, about 35 minutes. These came out so good I could have just eaten them out of hand. Instead, I exercised some self-control and saved most of them for the pasta dish.
2. Stir breadcrumbs and 2 Tbs olive oil in skillet over medium heat until crumbs brown, about 4 minutes. Dang, these were good too. Had to hide them from myself.
3. Cook pasta in large pot of boiling salted water for 10 minutes. Add asparagus; cook until asparagus is crisp-tender and pasta is tender but firm to the bite, about 4 minutes. (Alright, I couldn't abide by this instruction because I just can't stand overcooked pasta or vegetables. I cooked the asparagus and the pasta separately to make sure I got the desired firmness with each. Honestly, will one extra pot to wash kill you?)
4. Drain pasta and asparagus, either separately or together, depending on your particular quirks.
5. Transfer pasta and asparagus to large bowl and immediately add blue cheese and shallots. Toss until cheese melts. Season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with breadcrumbs.

Peanut Butter Connoisseurs

We are a peanut butter lovin' little family. Years ago, The Carnivore introduced me to peanut butter toast. I don't know how I made it through my childhood without discovering it on my own, and I am eternally grateful to him for teaching me such a fine lesson. I recently picked up a jar of Nutella (a chocolate and hazelnut butter concoction that I can thank my German friends for turning me on to) at the grocery store and now for breakfast I like to have a slice of whole wheat toast smeared with a thin layer of Nutella and an extra thick layer of crunchy peanut butter. 'Tis heaven on earth, and reasonably nutritous to boot. The protein, fat and whole-grain carbohydrate combination carries me straight through to lunch.

Odd Toddler prefers to eat his peanut butter straight. For his breakfast every morning, he likes to be handed a spoon and a small jar of peanut butter. He tucks into it and eats about 1/3 cup two or three times a day. He likes his toast plain and on the side. To each his own.

This morning, Odd Toddler woke me up at 5:30 because he needed his jar of peanut butter RIGHT AWAY. I retrieved it for him, along with a spoon, and brought him back to bed with me. He snuggled in between The Carnivore and I, took a giant bite of peanut butter, and then hugged the jar tightly to his chest and went back to sleep. Thankfully, this particular quirk is a nutritious one, albeit slightly messy in bed.

The AJC Food Section did a cover story a couple of weeks ago on convection baking. Our fabulous stove has this feature, but I rarely cook anything that would benefit from the continuous circulation of hot air. I was rewarded though when I found a recipe for Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (eureka!) in this article. Convection allows for cookies to be evenly baked on more than one rack at a time; never having baked cookies before, I didn't realize what a time-saver this would be. Since this was my first cookie attempt, I have no idea if cookie-baking is generally a difficult process, but these particular cookies turned out perfectly crisp and they tasted positively divine.

PEANUT BUTTER CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES (makes 24 crazy-big cookies)

• 1 stick unsalted butter, softened
• 1/4 cup creamy peanut butter (I used crunchy - the creamy kind bores me)
• 1 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt (I used kosher)
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (I used dark chocolate instead)

1. If using a convection oven, position racks for multi-rack baking and preheat the oven to 325 degrees using convection baking setting. If using a conventional oven, raise oven temp to 350 degrees and plan to cook on one rack at a time and rotate pan halfway through cooking.
2. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
3. Cream the butter, peanut butter and brown sugar together with an electric mixer on high speed until fluffy.
4. Add the egg and vanilla and mix until combined.
5. In a separate bowl, stir the flour, baking soda and salt together.
6. Stir the flour mixture into the peanut butter mixture until the flour is no longer visible.
7. Stir in the chocolate chips.
8. Try not to eat the batter. This step is easier when you don't have PMS.
9. Using a 1/4 cup measure, scoop the dough that you have refrained from eating and drop it onto the prepared cookie sheet, leaving 3 inches between the cookies. Use the tines of a fork to flatten the tops of the cookies to 1/2 - 1/4-inch thickness with a crosshatch pattern (this is harder than it sounds).
10. Bake the cookies for 12-15 minutes on convection, or for 15-17 minutes conventially, or until golden brown (I found it took longer, even with convection).
11. If self-control is your forte, cool the cookies before eating them.

The Bland Taste of Failure

I view failure in my own special way. I have yet to cook anything that is completely inedible (The Carnivore still holds that title from The Catfish Stew incident), but the past two nights have been disappointing nonetheless. Both dinners required about two hours of prep and cooking time, so I had high hopes each time, especially with such yummy-sounding new recipes as Potato Pancakes with Goat Cheese, and Garden-Style Lasagna. But the finished products were booorrring, and the end result has been much pouting and an uncontrollable itch to redeem myself with better meals. I may as well clear my calendar for this weekend, because I can see where this is leading...

Potato pancakes have long been a favorite for me (my old housemate used to make great ones for Hanukkah each year - maybe you have to be Jewish to get these right), but this was the second recipe I have tried for them and I think I'm close to admitting defeat. I'm not entirely sure if the problem lies with the tasteless results, or the fact that my pancakes never hold together. I lean towards the latter since my salmon cakes and my black bean patties never quite hold their shape either (at least they taste good though). But I find it so dang hard to give up without a fight.

The lasagna recipe should have been fabulous. It took two cups each of chopped onions, zucchini, yellow squash, carrots and broccoli; and I tend to expect sustained hard work to correlate with stellar results. I hate it when I'm wrong. The veggies were sauteed with garlic and layered with a cheese mixture, lasagna noodles and a spinach cream sauce. Sounds fabulous. Had no taste whatsoever. I'm not at all willing to give up on this recipe though, and I plan to tweak it just as soon as I get my cooking confidence back. Maybe with some herbs and spices, and stronger cheeses...

Matter of fact, both of my recipes came from Cooking Light magazine, and therein may lie the problem. Thus far, most of the recipes I have tried from this source have turned out wonderfully, but sometimes you have to sacrifice too much flavor when trying to cut back on the fat content. There is a fine line between eating healthy and eating boring, and I can only go so far with this. As far as I'm concerned, the goals are to eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, to eat whole grains instead of refined ones, and to avoid processed foods. As long as those goals are met, I say bring on the full-fat dairy products (as long as they're organic, of course). The lasagna suffered from the use of cottage cheese in place of ricotta, and by using low-fat milk thickened up with flour instead of just using half-and-half or, God forbid, heavy cream. I don't intend to make that mistake again.

Here's to fattening up those light recipes.

Creatures of Habit

When little somethings are bothering me, I worry a lot. Like when company is coming and the house is a mess, I sit around and fret and waste time before I realize that I could better spend my time by actually cleaning up the mess. Asinine? Yes. But when big somethings are going on, like this new financial mess, I am perfectly capable of grinning and bearing it. After all, the worst really COULD happen in this case, so I am fully aware that I could sit around fretting or I could do my best to work hard and trust that things are going to work out fine in the end. I mean, thank God, but I am not in charge of life so there is most likely no point in trying to carry around the weight of the world on my shoulders right now. So I allowed myself about an hour Monday night to freak out. And then I freaked out for another 30 minutes on Tuesday morning. And then I did what I do best. I baked a pie.

I am a creature of habit. I like to have a fairly steady schedule, and I'm not particularly fond of surprises. Of course, I have a toddler, so routines change every few months, and it throws me for a loop every time until I adjust. Odd Toddler's nap routine went really well for a few months there. At around 11:30am every day, he would eat some yogurt, rub his eyes, and then lay down quietly in his crib and sleep for two and a half hours. I could set my clock by him. All that has changed. He now takes his nap at about 1:30pm every day, and he needs about 30 minutes of snuggle time first. Then he only sleeps for about an hour. I am now, more than ever, the queen of efficiency. After all, I only have one hour a day now to get done All The Things You Can't Do When A Toddler Is Making His Demands.

I love our 30 minutes of snuggle time. Frankly, I need the snuggles now. After losing a baby, I am more aware than ever of the fragility of life, and so I am better able to actually slow down for half an hour and do nothing but sit in a rocking chair and love on Ray-Ray while he drifts off to sleep. Better yet, since efficiency is still the name of the game, I have timed this snuggle time to coincide with my favorite Food Network show, Everyday Italian. I absolutely CANNOT sit down in the middle of the day and watch a TV show without feeling like the laziest, most useless wench in the world. So I am eternally grateful to Odd Toddler for giving me the opportunity to sit down, guilt-free, right smack dab in the middle of the day and stock up on snuggles (which are becoming rare now that Ray-Ray is growing up on me) and at the same time, get to learn new food tricks and recipes. Nearly every day, as soon as Ray-Ray is sound asleep and the show has gone off, I go online and print out one or two of the recipes that Giada made during the show.

On Sunday afternoon, Giada made a chocolate ricotta pie. Yes, a Chocolate Ricotta Pie. I know, it made me swoon too. A mere 48 hours later, I was digging through the fridge and the pantry to see if I had the ingredients I would need to make said pie. I didn't have time to make a pie crust, and I'm still kind of wary of pie-crust-making in general, so I broke one of my cardinal rules and pulled a store-bought crust out of the freezer. Giada's pie was made with a pine nut crust, and then topped with a generous pile of more pine nuts. I am not fond of pine nuts, so I scrapped that ingredient altogether.

And Giada's version used semi-sweet chocolate chips. I not only didn't have any of those on hand, but I'm more of a dark chocolate kind of person anyway, so I decided to substitute the Hershey Special Dark chocolate chips that I had in the fridge. One can rarely, if ever, go wrong with dark chocolate. Besides, its better for you. The big issue was the whole busted food processor problem. Mom tried to help that morning by finding me most of the parts to an extra one she had. However, the attachment that stops the chopped items from being flung out the chute was missing, and that was going to be a CRUCIAL part of the processor considering I was going to be combining LIQUID ingredients. No matter how much I NEEDED that pie for emotional comfort, I was not willing to wipe liquid chocolate off of the walls of my kitchen.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth until The Carnivore managed to locate all of the parts to a blender my sister-in-law passed down to me, and then succeeded in figuring out how to operate it even though all of the words had rubbed off of the many oddly-placed buttons on the machine. He worked hard on this. Apparently Preston needed this pie as much as I did.

When all was said and done, the pie was crazy easy to make, especially since I skipped the time-consuming crust-making stage. And, OHMYWORD, this pie came straight from heaven. It. Was. So. Darned. Fabulous.

CHOCOLATE-RICOTTA PIE, adaped by Sarah

• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 8 oz dark chocolate chips
• 3/4 cup part-skim ricotta cheese
• 3 oz lowfat cream cheese, at room temperature
• 1 egg
• 3 egg yolks (I HATE separating eggs, but it was worth it. This time.)
• Deep dish pie shell

1. Combine sugar and water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Cool the sugar syrup slightly.
2. Melt the chocolate chips any way you see fit. I used the microwave to warm the chips a little, and then stirred them until they fully melted. Giada recommends using a double boiler. I don't have one.
3. Pulse the ricotta and cream cheese in a food processor (or whatever rigged up mechanical kitchen utensil you have on hand) until smooth. Add the egg and the yolks and process until combined. Giada recommends adding the eggs one at a time. I didn't feel like doing that.
4. Add the melted chocolate to the cheese mixture and process until combined. With the machine running, add the sugar syrup in a thin steady stream and process until smooth.
5. Pour the custard into the pie shell and bake at 350 degrees until the custard has set. The recipe said this should take 30 minutes, but it took an hour when I tried it.

The Carnivore and I loved this recipe. It tastes like an Italian chocolate cheesecake. Deysi and Yolie lucked into some leftovers that I brought to mom. Deysi loved it, but I'm not sure about Yolie. She opened the Tupperware container and SMELLED the pie before she tasted it. WHY WOULD YOU SMELL A PIE? My family is pretty weird to begin with, but that takes the cake. Or, in this case, the pie.

Kitchen Therapy

If I'm stressed out over something, I go to the kitchen. If I'm sad, if I'm anxious, if I'm cranky or mad, I do the same thing: I go to the kitchen. The easiest way to guage my mood is to come into my kitchen and see how many different recipes I have laid out on the counter. My moodiness greatly contributes to the happiness of my husband, my son and my mother, all of whom are required to eat up so that I can make room in the fridge for more leftovers.

We have been slapped with some heavy financial burdens recently, and I nearly fell apart last night when the latest disaster exploded in the form of our tax return. The day started off badly enough with an email that my friend's father had died. By the time I added together our monthly budget shortfall (which has #*%&^ increased lately), I had completely lost my appetite, so much so that I couldn't even eat my nightly square of espresso dark chocolate (and thats saying a lot).

Early this morning, I gave up and went to the kitchen. There aren't very many recipes that are conducive to being worked on at seven in the morning, but I have been carrying around a recipe for a veggie sandwich for a few weeks and I have been dying to try it. My Carnivorous husband is very open to eating vegetarian dishes, but this particular sandwich seemed too light to suffice for a filling-enough supper.

I've had a fun time recently bringing leftovers to my mother, so I decided this morning to prep the ingredients for this sandwich so that I could bring everything to my mother's house to assemble for our lunch. I pulled the recipe from a recent AJC Food Section, where it was included in an article on the now-defunct Good Ole Days restaurant in Atlanta, somewhere I never had the pleasure of eating. Actually, considering I only eat out around 3 or 4 times a year, my restaurant repertoire is fairly limited.

Happily, my sister Cristy was over at lunchtime as well, so I had the pleasure of serving the sandwiches for the three of us. Out of my vast collection of siblings, Cristy is probably the most culinarily adventurous (and the only one besides me who doesn't eat red meat or chicken). The praise I received for this meal did a lot to improve my mood.

GOOD OLE DAYS SANDWICH, adapted by Sarah of course (makes 3 sandwiches)

• 1/4 cup shredded sweet onion
• 1/4 cup shredded carrot
• 1/4 cup shredded sweet potato
• 6 oz shredded cheddar cheese
• 6 oz shredded swiss cheese
• 6 slices whole wheat bread
• shredded lettuce
• 1/2 can mung bean sprouts

1. Combine the onion, carrot and sweet potato in a freezer-proof container and freeze for an hour or more. Remove from freezer and thaw completely.
2. Divide the thawed vegetables over three slices of bread.
3. Top with cheddar and then swiss.
4. Bake at 350 degrees for 3 to 5 minutes (also bake remaining three pieces of bread at same time).
5. Top melted cheese with lettuce and bean sprouts, and top with remaining bread.
6. Serve warm.

I busted my food processor this weekend and thus found it to be a mongo pain in my butt to shred the vegetables on a hand-held cheese grater (especially the carrot - ever tried to shred a skinny little carrot without shredding your hand with it?). 'Twas worth the trouble.

The brilliance of this recipe is that you can make a big batch of the veggies ahead of time and pull them from the freezer as needed. As a matter of fact, the ingredients all travel well, enough so that everything could be thrown into sandwich bags and taken to work, where the sandwich could be assembled and popped into a small toaster oven for a few minutes. The fiber and protein combo make for a great midday energy boost.