Quinoa salad

Yes, this is typically how we experience healthy food. This
time will be different

Last week I decided to actually splurge and buy meat as a reward to myself for not dying or punching somebody during a period of insane overwork. Fortunately that overwork has been done with for almost a week, which I've spent celebrating my freedom. A week or so of celebration will take it out of you though, and you get to thinking that it might be a good idea to take it easy, release any hostages you may-or-may-not have taken, and put something healthy-ish in your body. Sure, quinoa may sound scary, and it may take an inordinate amount of effort to make it not taste like rain gutters, but if you put in that effort you can totally lord how healthy you're being over your friends and neighbors.

Ingredients:

1 Cup of Water
1 Cup of Quinoa
1 Yellow Pepper
1 Carrot
1/2 a Red Onion
1/4 Cup Dried Cranberries
4 tsp Olive Oil
1 TBSP Balsamic Vinegar
1 TBSP Raspberry Preserves
1/8 tsp Black Pepper
Salt

The first thing you're going to need to do is wash off your quinoa. Leading food-science experts agree that this will appease the tiny demons living in your food and ensure that your quinoa is flavorful and fluffy. Then toss it in your water along with 1 tsp of olive oil, one average-sized human's pinch of salt, and your black pepper. Bring that whole mess up to a boil, then cover it and reduce the heat down to low for about 12 minutes, or until the liquid is all absorbed. And yes, this is exactly the same way I'd make white rice because, at the risk of asserting my moral superiority over you, I don't see quinoa's differences. I just treat it like everybody else. Anyhow, while your quinoa is cooking, it's time for you to get a-chopping. Chop up your pepper and red onion into reasonably bite-sized chunks, and go ahead and peel your carrot before you shred it to smithereens. Which of course means that it's time to re-introduce our favorite kitchen gadget that hasn't yet succeeded in killing us (Only maimings so far!), the box grater! Fortunately for those of us in favor of keeping our blood on our insides, I've managed to outsmart the grater this time. If you've got the financial capital, buy yourself two carrots instead of one. Then just shred half of each one, keeping your hands and delicious blood out of reach of the grater. And sure, this may cause an unfortunate amount of food waste, but that's the price of holding on to your blood. Also, you could just eat the extra carrot hunks.

I can feel my mouth watering and my liver healing itself
just by looking at that.

Take a bowl and mix together the rest of your oil, your vinegar, and your raspberry preserves, along with another average pinch of salt. Then get ready for some mildly unsettling noises, because it's time to splorp everything together into one large bowl. So combine your veg, dried cranberries, dressing, and quinoa, and stir until the whole deal looks homogenous. You can technically consume this immediately (Well, I mean technically you could have eaten it without cooking the quinoa. It wouldn't have been a good idea, but you still could have done it), but it will taste even better if you let it sit covered in the fridge for an hour. In any event, it'll taste delicious, be slightly healthier than the diet of pizza and whiskey you may have been living on lately, and will maybe keep you alive for a week or so longer so you can enjoy more pizza and whiskey. Hypothetically. Happy quinoa!

Meat Sauce

It's been too long

Sometimes food is like a warm blanket. Comforting, calming, and if you leave it out long enough, fuzzy. It's important to remind ourselves every now and again that life is good, and everything will be ok. Sometimes we need to do this because our favorite TV show got cancelled. Sometimes it's because we worked a 90+ hour work week in which we weren't allowed, even once, to slap people across the face no matter how much they deserved it. Regardless, a good way to relax and calm the demons chattering away in your head is with a delicious home-cooked meal. Which you may not have the time or energy to make because of your insane work schedule. Fortunately, there's an easy and delicious sauce you can make during your free time one night at 3 in the morning that you can add to pretty much anything later to form a delicious meal. You know, hypothetically.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Ground Beef
1 standard-issue Onion
2 Green Peppers
2 Carrots
1 TBSP Tomato Paste
1 24 oz. jar of Marinara Sauce (Sure, you could totally make your own tomato-based sauce for this recipe, and it'll be totally delicious. But the entire point here is to make something simple, easy, and likely from things you have lying around. So use any decent-quality store-bought marinara)
1/2 tsp Garlic Powder
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
Salt
Oil

The first thing you're going to need to do is find the will to do anything at all. Sure, it's easy once you've got the sauce started. Then you can smell delicious food that's totally worth hanging around for. But before that, all you've got is the hope of future deliciousness, which can make it hard to motivate yourself to actually get started and not just collapse into a bed until an alarm clock somehow survives its daily task of waking you up. The best advice I can offer is that if any of you invent time travel in the future, travel back to now and reassure yourself that the payoff will be huge and totally worth it. Once you've got that taken care of, it's time to brown your meat. Heat up a pan over medium-high heat, and toss in your beef along with a standard-human's pinch of salt. It should sizzle when you do. If you don't hear a sizzle you either didn't let your pan heat up, or in your tired and delirious state you accidentally threw something else in there instead of beef. Once your beef is in the pan, break it up into little bits with a wooden spoon. You want as much beef surface area touching the hot metal pan as possible. Once your beef's will and body are irrevocably broken, stir it occasionally, allowing it time to actually brown. Then pour everything out of your pan into a bowl for safe-keeping. Throw a little bit of oil in the pan to coat it, return it to the heat and then toss in your onion, carrots, and green pepper, all of which you've undoubtedly prepared by chopping in to bite-sized chunks during this time, along with another standard-human's pinch of salt.

You could use this sauce to make a dish hearty and delicious
Or you can just slorp it straight out of the bowl. Options.

As liquid cooks out of your onion, scrape the bottom of your pan with your wooden spoon to work out any crusty brown bits from your meat and bring their inherent deliciousness into the flavor party you're creating. After about 2 minutes of cooking your vegetables, toss your meat back in to the pan along with your garlic powder, black pepper, cayenne, and tomato paste. Stir all of this nonsense together until the tomato paste starts to smell less like a tin can, and more like a lot of deliciousness. If you're sense of smell isn't the strongest, let it cook for about a minute and a half. Then add in your marinara, stir to combine, and bring the whole thing to a boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer, and let the flavors all get to know each other for a while. But it's 3:30 in the morning and we want to just sleep, so we can't let it sit for too long. I'd say bare minimum 5 minutes, probably not more than 4 hours. In any case, the end result will be a delicious, hearty, meaty sauce that satiates your body and soul and gives you the will to fight another day in to submission. You can throw it on pasta, roll it in puff-pastry and bake it, throw it on nachos. You've got a lot of consumption options, is the point I'm trying to make. Have fun, enjoy, and remember that if you're feeling stressed or overwhelmed this week: don't bother me because I'm trying to finally get some sleep.

Crockpot Baked Potatoes

Look at them, all snug and cozy. They don't even know they're
about to get cooked to death for 9 hours.

Since the dawn of time, mankind has struggled with one thing above all else. But there's nothing I can do to help you with your taxes, so we're gonna talk about potatoes instead. Baked potatoes are absolutely delicious, a truth which few people ever get to know because they (the potatoes) take approximately a lifetime to cook, and by that time you've got better things to worry about than potatoes. Thing like trying to get the neighborhood kids to have less fun, and eating dinner at 4 PM. Fortunately, with the advent of crockpot technology, you can just leave your potatoes cooking in a corner somewhere, forget about them, accidentally trip over your crockpot, and just when you get super angry at a cruel universe that you never asked to be a part of in the first place, get rewarded with a trove of delicious potatoes spilling out like buried pirate treasure.

Ingredients

5-8 Russet Potatoes (I don't care what the mainstream media tells you, russet potatoes are the ideal potatoes for baked potatoes. Depending on their size and the size of your crockpot, you'll be using more or less of them)
Oil
Salt
Garlic Butter (You can make this by sautéing garlic in some butter, then letting it cool. If that's too much effort for you, you can totally just use regular butter. Just know that we're all judging you.)
Sour Cream
Chives
Aluminum Foil

The first thing you're gonna need to do, according to several experts who are my mother, is carefully wash and scrub your potatoes forever. She has a thing about dirt. You can often find her saying things like "Potatoes grow in the ground...the ground is full of dirt" to no one in particular. She's technically right, but I still feel that rinsing off your potatoes and removing any obvious dirt clumps is more than enough effort to put in. In any case, once your potatoes are sufficiently clean, it's time to rub them down with some oil. Any cooking oil will do, though I prefer Olive Oil for several culinary reasons including the fact that I had some lying around. Take your oily potatoes and rub them down with salt. This is an important step because potatoes and salt are like a desert and water. No matter how much salt you add, there never seems to be any around. But if you add even a drop too much, you've got a flood plain on your hand. Take your salty oily potatoes and individually wrap them in aluminum foil. Toss them in your crockpot and wait.

No matter what Pinterest and Food Network tell you, baked
potatoes are supposed to be rustic and hearty, not dainty and
fancy. Also, I wasn't lying about having work in 5 minutes

I should have clarified. Turn your crockpot on, to low specifically, and then wait. Or sleep, or whatever, because even with our advanced foil and crockpot technology, this is still gonna take about 9 hours to cook. So maybe do this overnight, or before you marathon an epic movie trilogy. In any case, once your time is up open up your crockpot, unwrap your potatoes, then split them open and add toppings. I went with garlic butter, sour cream, and chives. You're welcome to go with something completely different and probably inferior, because these are your potatoes and you can bend them to your will probably. If you want to put more effort in, you can top them with sautéed vegetables and cheese, and then throw them in the oven until the cheese is browned. That'll totally be delicious, but also kind of takes away from the point of making these things in a crockpot to begin with. But maybe you enjoy contradiction. Maybe you're a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a vest. Maybe I'm going to go eat some potatoes in the 5 minutes I have before work. See you next week!

Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies

These cookies are delicious. Dancing strangers in banana
suits will try and steal them. Don't let this happen. 

Peanut butter is interesting stuff. It's a key ingredient in delicious spicy soups and tasty sweet desserts alike. Also people slather it on bread along with jelly and call it a meal. There isn't technically anything wrong with this. The flavors go, it tastes pretty good, and it's filling. Also, it's super easy to just slather assorted goops on to bread and call it lunch for your kids, and easy is a valuable thing when you're a parent. I've seen parents. They need all of the help that they can get. Still, given peanut butter's versatility, it seems like we're not getting everything that we can out of this flavor pairing. Because peanut butter and jelly is straight up delicious. We don't think about it much because we associate the flavors with kids, and we tend to dismiss everything about kids because it helps us ignore how jealous we are that they don't have to pay rent. 

Ingredients:

1 Cup Peanut Butter (Now ordinarily when you're cooking you'd use smooth peanut butter. And of course, this is no exception.)

3/4 Cup Brown Sugar

1 Stick Butter

1 Egg

1 typically-sized human's pinch of Salt

3/4 Cup Flour

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

1/4 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 tsp Baking Soda

Raspberry Jam

More Sugar!

The first thing you're going to need to do is wait. Like, forever. Because you need your butter to be room temperature, and warming up to room temperature isn't something that butter takes lightly. It's got to take some time and really learn about itself, maybe travel the world and live a little bit, before it makes that kind of commitment. Eventually, when your butter is ready to settle down, punish it for its indecisiveness by creaming your brown sugar right in to its face. Sure, that may sound violent. But "creaming" sugar in to butter is really just rapidly beating the crystalline structure of the sugar in to the butter so that it rips innumerable tiny holes in it which trap in air. Anyhow, once you're done torturing your butter for toying with your emotions, beat in your peanut butter, egg, and vanilla. In another bowl, whisk together your flour, baking soda, and baking powder, along with your pinch of salt. Slowly add your flour mix in to your peanut butter glop, and stir until it's combined. Grease up a baking sheet, and start portioning out some cookies. Grab about a ping-pong-ball-sized chunk of your cookie dough, and roll it in some sugar until it holds its shape well. Put it on your baking sheet, and repeat until you're out of dough. Bear in mind, these things are going to be light, fluffy, slightly crumbly cookies, and as such they'll need some room to spread out when cooking. Overcrowd your baking sheet at your own peril.

Not pictured: The many cookies I ate before remembering
that I needed to take some pictures.

Take your thumb, and lightly press down on to the cookie ball in order to slightly flatten it and make a little well in your cookie. If you don't have any thumbs, do your best with assorted spoons or mannequin hands, or whatever's lying around. Throw those suckers (the cookies) in a 350 degree oven for about 35 minutes, when they darken in color and start to hold their shape. Now let's talk filling. For the most delicious results, take your cookies out of the oven half-way through their cook time, fill them with your raspberry jam, and throw them back in the oven for the remainder of the time. For the prettiest results, let your cookies finish cooking before filling them up with your jam. It's up to you whether you value form or function more. And, just to be clear, it's going to be delicious either way. Just one way will be more delicious, and the other way will be more the wrong decision to have made. I will say this though: if you decide to make the right decision and go for maximum deliciousness, bear in mind that the jelly is hot when it comes out of the oven. So even though you're tempted by the obvious awesomeness, try and resist the urge to just bite in to one because you'll totally burn yourself. With hot sticky jam, which will stick to you, and then keep on burning you. We both know you're going to do it anyway, but at least now you've been warned.

Smoked Fish Salad

Just like a narcissistic hoarder mermaid, we're gonna betray
this little guy. Fortunately, he'll taste delicious.

Well, it's a new year out there. From what I've seen so far it's mostly like the old year, but you can never be too sure. I'm only like halfway through testing out laws of physics, so there could be some fun new surprises in 2018. But I digress. Like I said, it's a new year, so I figured that it's a good time to make some old-world food that somehow stood the test of time. Specifically, I'm making a smoked whitefish salad, which is an absurdly tasty thing to eat with bread, crackers, or vegetables, plus is full of protein so it'll help you survive the harsh winter you'd experience in a frozen wasteland like Siberia or Chicago. You can technically still buy this stuff nowadays in delis and whatnot, but it's usually full of sugar. Which normally I don't have a problem with, but we're talking fish and (apparently) that's where I draw the line.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Whole Smoked Fish (I bought smoked chubs, because that's the flavor I grew up with. You've got some leeway here, but stick in that general vicinity. Pretty much any fish you could reasonably expect to catch on a midwestern fishing trip.)
2 Ribs of Celery
3 TBSP Mayonnaise
2 TBSP Sour Cream
1.5 TBSP Fresh Dill
1 TBSP Prepared Horseradish (It's important to help your horseradish prepare for what's coming next)
1 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
Juice from 1/2 a Lemon
Salt 
Black Pepper
Chives

The first thing you're gonna need to do is remove the meat from your fish. Ideally you should have started this some time back in 2017, because it'll take a while. It's not that it's particularly hard to get at the meat. It's that there are, at a conservative estimate, 37,000 tiny little bones that are going to try and come along for the ride. There aren't any good ways to help with this, but there are a couple of methods to try and help minimize the horror. One option is to kind of flake the fish off of the bones with a couple of forks. Prayer and shouting angrily are other, equally effective methods. Long story short, even after you carefully remove the fish from the bones, you're probably going to want to go over them between one and seven times, just to double (septuple) check that you're completely bone free. The bad news is that if you were to look at a clock you'd note that this entire process has taken forever. The good news is that it's pretty much antarctica outside, so where else did you have to be exactly?

This fish smoked 3 packs a day for the sake of flavor.
Let's not let that sacrifice be in vain. 

Once your fish is boneless, lightly mash it into chunks with a fork or other implement of culinary destruction. Then choppity chop up your celery in to tiny bits and toss it in there along with your chopped dill, your mayo, sour cream, horseradish, worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice. Mix the whole thing into a homogenous fish glop, and salt and pepper it to taste. Cover it up and toss it in your fridge for at least a couple hours so that all of the flavors get to know each other. This is important. Flavors that don't know each other, who awkwardly stand at either end of the dance floor staring at the ground can ruin an otherwise awesome dish. When you're serving this (by which I mean eating it on the couch while watching Netflix), take it out of the fridge, top it off with some fresh chopped chives, and slather it up on anything you've got lying around. Crackers, cucumbers, the flesh of those too weak to make it through the winter. This will make anything taste smoky, and salty, and awesome. So enjoy the winter! There's only like 3 and a half months left.