4. Herbed Quinoa

If you haven't already figured it out, and if you choose to keep reading this blog, you'll figure out I'm quite opinionated.  I have some very strong views on many things.  Even things relevant to this blog.  I decided to make this blog very personal and part of that will include my personal views on certain things.  However, I also like readers.  So, I don't want to chase them off.  Yet, I think trying to please everyone is the kind of second guessing that's turned me off of some things I have strong opinions about. One thing I try to remember when breaching the topic of things I feel strongly about is what Bad Astronomer, Phil Plaitt, said, "Nobody in the history of humankind has ever changed their mind about something they have wrapped up in their self identity, because they were screamed at by someone."  I won't pretend to have an opinion I don't agree with, but I'll try to be nice about the ones I do.

Personally, I can disagree someone and still be their friend.  In fact, if I chose to not associate with those with opinions I disagree with I wouldn't have any friends at all.  Some of my friends I am almost completely opposite to in matters of politics and/or religion.  I have the utmost respect for those I can debate with and still remain friends.  Don't get me wrong though, I still enjoy and need to spend time among like minded folks too.  For those whom I have certain disagreements, I don't have a problem with them thinking I'm wrong, because I think they're wrong too.  We almost have to if we truly are who we say we are.  In other words, I can agree to disagree.  However, I would be a liar if I didn't admit I do have my limits, I'm not going to be friends with Nazis, KKK members, or similar people.  I don't want to open my mind so far that my brain falls out.

I'm sure I'll come up with something that some or most, hopefully not all, of you will disagree.  I hope I won't lose too many readers as a result but if ya gotta go I won't beg for your return.  However, if you rationally discuss the issue with me I may even change my mind. I have a bad habit of admitting that I can be wrong sometimes.  What's worse is, contrary to the way most behave, I don't think admitting error shows weakness, mostly it's a sign of strength to me.  So feel free to express your opinions to me.  I just hope you can express the same demeanor I choose to communicate my opinion to you.

Herbed Quinoa

I only recently heard of quinoa (pronounced keen-wah), but it got a big endorsement from Men's Health Magazine for being a seed that is grain-like but has more protein than wheat or rice.  So I thought I'd try the simple recipe they gave for preparing it, Herbed Quinoa.

Ingredients

1 cup quinoa

2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 shallots, chopped
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup chives
1/2 cup basil

Quinoa

Add 1 cup of quinoa to 2 cups of boiling water.  Reduce heat to simmer and cover for 10-15 minutes when the seeds turn translucent and it's absorbed all the water. 

I got a box of this stuff at Trader Joe's but Whole Foods has it in bulk and I think it's cheaper that way.

  When this stuff was cooking it had a peculiar burning leaves smell.  I kept checking it and stirring it to ensure it wasn't burning and it was fine.  Don't worry, it doesn't taste like the smell.  When I cooked it I took it all the way to fifteen minutes without burning it.  I let it set for another ten minutes or so to let it absorb more moisture.

Saute 
In a separate frying pan heat 2 tablespoons of pure olive oil.  Don't use extra virgin, it scorches too easily.  I hated cooking with olive oil before I learned that pure olive oil cooks better.  Save your extra virgin olive oil for salads and other things.  Then saute garlic and shallots with the lemon juice.  

The Finish

When the garlic starts to turn brown add the basil and chives.  The original called for fresh but I used the dry stuff that I bought in the spice department at Kroger and it worked fine.  Then mix this in with the saute for a minute or two.  When I first made this, I thought there would be too much basil and chives, but it seemed less so when I added the quinoa and cooked it for another two minutes.  Then it's ready to serve!

Admittedly I had my doubts cooking this recipe, but it turns out quite lively and tasty!

I'm a big fan of science, especially astronomy, and Phil Plait is one of my heroes for being an awesome astronomer and a brilliant representative of the scientific skepticism community.  

   

   

3. Avocado Kale Salad

It's a good thing I love veggies.  This avocado kale salad is unabashedly greens and more!

I dislike very few kinds of food.  It makes healthy eating easy and difficult at the same time.  You might think with such eclectic tastes I wouldn't be in the rigmarole that I'm in now.  Despite liking all kinds of good stuff I have a huge weakness for soda pop.  I don't even want to try to count the calories on how much a couple of two liters or a twelve pack of Mountain Dew in cans could add up to.  I didn't drink that every day, but I often did.  I also have a weakness for pizza, greasy foods, and salty snacks.  Sure pizza may not be the worst of junk foods, but the calories add up when I eat a whole large pizza in one sitting.  Quite often an open bag of chips meant an empty bag of chips in the same night.  Sometimes dinner meant a whole box of Kraft macoroni and cheese and a can of peas as a side dish.  Take the sodium content of those two things alone and add a few shakes Lawry's seasoned salt to it, sometimes soy sauce on the peas, and I was giving myself quite a sodium blast.   It's not easy to admit but this wasn't just self indulgence, I really had a death wish.  Because of my depression problems, I knew I was killing myself slowly and I didn't care.  I don't want to go on about my psychological problems too much but they are a factor in all of this.

However, aside from feeling sorry for myself, I also bought into the junk food junkie's cliche's like, "I don't want to live forever if I can't eat what I want whenever I want;"  "There's all kinds of people who smoke, drink, and eat what they want and live to be a hundred;" and "No one tells me what I can or can't eat."  There's much to be said about twentysomething paranoia.  I really thought "they" were out to get me.  Who were they?  A lot of people that really weren't.  I even got into space alien conspiracies, but that's gone now.  Sometimes I still have to take a deep breath and remind myself that recommendations for healthy eating aren't people pushing me around.  Sure, some people are out to make a buck, and they may be full of shit, but some of it is sound advice.  I think it's pretty obvious that fresh vegetables are healthier than cake and ice cream.  I just have to learn how to carefully evaluate the information with reason.  I also come to realize that whether I die tomorrow or sixty years from now it's not about how long I lived so much as it is about how well I lived.  The limits my health puts on my life these past few years and now are heartbreaking to me.  I want to be able to dance again, walk around more, drive, work, and make my own living.  Unemployment and living off the kindness of others may sound like paradise but it's rather undignified.  Being at the mercy of others requires a lot of patience, compromise, forgiveness, and venting misery when no one is looking.  Yet, healthy eating has already improved my daily life and I won't regret that even if I kicked the bucket tomorrow.

  Since I'm not a fussy eater I cannot say these recipes are great for the fussy eater.  I'll try to be nice, but I kind of find fussy eaters annoying so it's hard to be sympathetic to someone who eats like a three year old.  Because I sincerely doubt veggie haters will take exception to my next recipe.  For the rest of us, it's pretty damn tasty!


Avocado Kale Salad
 I took this recipe off of gliving.com.  Here's the link for the recipe there.  Below is my experience making it an eating it.  My recipe has been tweaked from the original. 


Ingredients
1 head of kale, destemmed
2 avocados
1/3 cup lemon juice
2 roma tomatoes
1 12 oz can of bean sprouts (or a handful of fresh mung bean sprouts)
Kosher salt to taste
Cayenne pepper to taste


Kale

I don't think I've ever had kale before.  If I did, it was in something that I was unaware of that had kale as an ingredient.  From what I understand raw kale is not as popular as steamed kale.  Actually, it was kind of difficult to find kale.  I ended up finding it in the organic produce section of one out of four supermarkets I looked.  Not even Trader Joe's in Cleveland had it, but they really don't have a very impressive produce section.

Being a leafy green I figured I'd have to wash it very well for fear of grit, which I've encountered with fresh spinach and other greens.  So I rinsed the stuff thoroughly, ripped the leafy part from the coarse stem, threw out the stems, placed the leaves between two towels, and rolled the towels, setting them aside to dry.  

Tomatoes and Sprouts

Since the recipe calls for me to dice the tomatoes I choose roma tomatoes because I find them the easiest to dice.  Check out my blog entry on tabbouleh to get the details on dicing tomatoes the Kitchen Outlaw way.  Then throw them in a big bowl for mixing.  You want to use the biggest bowl you can for ease of mixing, then transfer them to a smaller bowl for serving and for the sake of room in your fridge. 

The original recipe calls for fresh mung bean sprouts.  I love them.  Sometimes, I buy them, rinse them, and eat them by themselves.  But the three or so grocery stores I went to last week were all out of fresh bean sprouts!  So I figured "What the hell?" and got them in the can.  I opened the can and rinsed them in a colander to rinse away some salt.  I've read in quite a few places that rinsing canned goods will cut the salt content some.  I shook these suckers dry and threw them in the bowl with the tomatoes.  They tasted fine to me.

See, I get to use my lemon juice again and here's the can of bean sprouts.  It may be heresy but I wasn't going to scan the entire city for some fresh bean sprouts!

At this time I unrolled my kale and it was dry.  The rolled towel method gets leafy veggies really dry in ten to fifteen minutes.  I tore them into bite sized pieces and threw them in with the tomatoes and sprouts.  I know this can be tedious but really focus on getting the greens into bite size pieces.  I find most people make salads with big giant greens that fall off the fork or slap you in the face when you fork it into your mouth.  Hey, I have a goatee so cut me some slack!  As I did this I took a taste of the kale.  It's bitter but not as bitter as raw collard greens, which require a little taste acquiring but are good in the long run.  That reminds me of what another one of my hero chefs, Gordon Ramsay tells everyone he instructs in cooking, to taste the food your making.  You need to know what good, fresh, well cooked food tastes like, and you need to know what your serving, even if it's for yourself.

Avocados

The best avocados are the ones that are ripe enough to have a little give to them when you handle them with the skin.  These guys are pear shaped and I cut into them lengthwise until I feel  the pit touch the knife.  I then cut around the pit.  If it's ripe enough it should easily separate into two halves, one with a half pit sized divet and a pit.  I take a spoon and delicately take it out trying not to take any of the "flesh" with it.  The pit might make some good ammo for your table top catapult model, but if you don't have one throw it away.  I then take the spoon and place it as close to the inside of the skin as I can and slowly scoop out the avocado.  If I'm lucky I'll get it out in one piece, but don't worry if you can't just scoop out as much as you can.  When you dump them in the bowl immediately pour 1/3 cup of lemon juice on it.  Lemon or lime juice not only adds good flavor but it also prevents the avocado from oxidizing, which causes discoloration and eventually an unpleasant flavor.

Now, with clean hands, dig in, and mush up the avocados with the rest of the ingredients.  This may be a little tedious if you do it right.  In fact if you don't get a little tired of mashing the avocado chunks into smaller chunks or mush, then you probably half-assed it.  I may be the Kitchen Outlaw, but half-assing a job is even a crime to me.  Now the original recipe doesn't specify how much you should mush it up.  I left some of the avocado in chunks a tiny bit smaller than bit sized for added avocado punch.  So, it's not quite glorified guacamole.   In the photo at the top, you can see the light green chunks.  Now go wash your hands again.

There I go mushing the avocado with my short chubby fingers.  Having over-sized baby hands makes this step in the recipe a little tiring and playing the guitar really difficult.

The Finish

The original recipe calls for sea salt but I have this huge box of kosher salt that seems to keep on giving.  So why waste the money on sea salt when kosher is probably better anyway?  (All hail Alton Brown!)  

Then add some cayenne pepper.  I started with about 1/8 of a teaspoon, then stirred it.  I have a hard time finding the right balance for cayenne pepper.  I used to be a real spicy food nut. The spicier the better and if you didn't like it face melting hot you were a wimp and should  be thrown to the wolves, but that was more raging testosterone and ego than taste.  Well, despite my best efforts, eating super spicy food didn't get me laid and after a while I just wanted to be able to taste food again.  Just the right amount of heat can be enhancing to taste but you don't want it to mask the subtle flavors of the other ingredients.  Otherwise, why cook?  Just drink straight from the bottle and become a hot sauce drunk.

Stir the mixture with a spoon, give it a taste, and add more salt or cayenne if necessary.  The recipe says to serve it immediately but I found it much tastier after it marinaded a while.

Another of my hero chefs, Gordon Ramsay, may be best known for his foul mouth and hot temper, but after watching just about all of his many shows he turns out to be quite dedicated, passionate, compassionate, and a very loving family man.  He's really a good person with no tolerance for bullshit.  Of course he's also a genius when it comes to food preparation and quite mindful of healthy cooking and eating.

   

  

2. Tabbouleh!

A few things about me and this blog before I start with the first recipe.  I hope to prevent mistakes about what to expect when reading Cookin' with Plaid.  The first warning about me is I'm not a gourmet, nor am I fixated on authenticity.  For those of you who have known me for years, know there was a time in my life when I was more like that, but I'm older and poorer and learned to be much more pragmatic about things.  However, this doesn't mean I don't get fancy at all.  Nor does it mean I refuse to use the authentic.  That would just be stupid.  I just do the best I can to make healthy food enjoyable to eat.  Sometimes that means I have to make it affordable, I can't enjoy it if I can't buy it.  

A further caveat, I think shopping with politics is a dead end street because I think could probably find something wrong with just about every food company in existence.  I'm not going to live in a cave and hunt and gather in the woods for my daily food just because food companies won't be as perfect as I want them to.  Actually I gave up radical politics years ago, I'm a confirmed city dweller and while history is interesting and quaint, I love technology too much to live in the past.  So if you have a beef with modern technology or a certain company and are protesting it for some reason, good for you, but, generally, I don't boycott.

One more thing, as if that weren't enough, I plan to be intentionally anecdotal.  As I write about my recipes and cooking, I'll include a lot of personal thoughts, ideas, and experiences.  There's plenty of places to go for the straight dope on recipes.  This blog is not a recipe encyclopedia. So, if you don't enjoy my beating around the bush, stop reading this now.


Tabbouleh!
As dark and terrible as it ended, some good things came from my former marriage, (They had to I'm not that much of a masochist!) and one of them was my ex-wife introducing me to tabbouleh.  According to Wikipedia, Lebanese tabbouleh emphasizes parsley and that's the way I like it.  Before tabbouleh parsley was just a weird green thing on my plate at certain restaurants.  I ate it occasionally and didn't think much of it either way, but I had no idea what a dynamite salad it makes.  I found quite a few recipes on the internet and tried to get the one's closest to the tabbouleh I ate at Ferdo's or Tiger Bakery in Toledo.  I got a few together and tried them out as they were written, then I tweaked them to my personal taste, budget, and ease of preparation.  I also figured out what it takes to make a big ass bowl.  So be warned this is for a big ass bowl of tabbouleh, like the kind of bowl tossed salad is kept.

Tabbouleh in a big-ass salad bowl!

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup of bulgur (cracked wheat)
3 roma tomatoes, diced
2 cucumbers, diced
4-6 green onions, chopped
2 bunches of curley parsley, chopped
1/3 cup of lemon juice
1/3 cup of extra virgin olive oil

Preparing the Bulgur 
Apparently my home town Toledo, Ohio has a significant Lebanese population, so Lebanese foods are pretty easy to find, I used to get all of my stuff from the Tiger Bakery or Kroger.  However, when I moved to Columbus a couple of years ago, and then, not too long after that, Cleveland, I found certain ingredients difficult to find. They're weren't completely absent, just not as convenient to find as it was in Toledo.  So if you're gonna look for bulgur (cracked wheat) you may have some difficulty.  Fortunately, they carry it in the "Mediterranean Foods" section of the Dave's Supermarket near my pad in Cleveland Heights.  (Cleveland doesn't have a Kroger and I miss it so.)  They have Ziyad brand burghul (another name for bulgar, but also conveniently label it "cracked wheat.")  The package displays very clear instructions on how to prepare the bulgur and a decent recipe for tabbouleh as well.  You may have to get your bulgur from Whole Foods or some other kind of health food store where they have it in bulk, It may be cheaper that way.   

It's probably best to start making the tabbouleh with the bulgur because part of the preparation is having it sit for a half hour.  First clean it by immersing the bulgur in cold water and changing the water a couple of times.  The bulgur comes in tiny pieces and I suggest using a screen strainer to drain the water.  A colander's holes are sometimes big enough for the bulgur to slip through.  You might even lose some in your screen strainer but probably not as much.  Then put it in a bowl and cover it with boiling water and set aside for at least 30 minutes.

THE VEGGIES:

I like clean veggies but I hate it when they're too wet.  So when I thoroughly rinse the curly parsley I dry them by placing them between two towels, rolling them up like sushi and setting aside while I chop tomatoes.

Although the recipe calls for regular-ass tomatoes, I saw this nifty video on youtube that showed how roma tomatoes are better for dicing.  You start by cutting off the ends and basically coring the gelatinous inner parts out.  I also use the more solid parts of the core and scrape away the jelly stuff.  The rhine and these more solid parts are easier to cut for dicing.  

Just cut off the ends to the tomato, slip your knife in an cut out the core.

Here's the roma without the core.

Now it's time to dice them into d6!

  Just throw your diced tomatoes into the salad bowl and chop some green onions.  This makes enough salad that 4 to 6 chopped green onions should be good, they're no too strong and you can pretty much use the whole bunch as packaged in the produce department.  I chop them into tiny little rings and throw them in with my tomatoes.  Go ahead and stir it a little if you want.  I like stirring as I go.

 After all of that dicing and chopping the parsley should be dry.  I unroll it slowly, then tear it by hand into pieces about the size of my index finger tip and throw it into my little food processor.

I picked up this little food processor on clearance sale at Kroger for ten bucks four years ago and I use the hell out of it.

 I chop up the parsely in the processor for probably thirty seconds or so.  Just as long as it takes to get the consistency I want.  I like it chopped rather finely.  Another preference I have is curly parsley.  Most recipes call for the flat kind. I used curly parsley once because that was all I had.  As it turned out I liked the curly better.  When you're done chopping the parsley throw it in the bowl.  

DRESSING
Most recipes insist on fresh lemons for their recipes.  This is fine, but I hate juicing by hand.  Since I figured that I was going to be making a lot of dishes with lemon juice (especially lots of tabbouleh) it wouldn't hurt to buy a bottle of Giant Eagle Brand lemon juice,

It's gourmet chef heresy, but I'm the kitchen outlaw and these work just fine for me.

Yes, that's Crisco Extra Virgin Olive Oil. It's not too pricey and tastes just fine to me.  If you just have to have oil made from olives hand pressed by a cyclops on a remote Greek island that's your business!

Just add 1/3 cup each of the lemon juice and olive oil, then add pepper and salt.  Okay, this is where I get a little fancy because I use fresh ground pepper and kosher salt.  Actually, the ground pepper is from one of those disposable pepper grinders and I don't know why kosher salt is considered fancy, its not expensive at all and highly recommended by one of my hero chef's from Food Network's Good Eats Alton Brown.  Go ahead and give it a stir!

THE FINISH!

When you return to the bulgur it should look like there's a lot more than when you started.  With clean hands, scoop up some bulgur, squeeze it over the sink to release as much water as you can and throw it in your bowl.  It gets your hands messy, but you really don't want soggy bulgur.

Now stir all the ingredients to spread them evenly as you can throughout the mixture.  Cover your bowl and place in refrigerator to marinade for at least two hours.  You may notice the salad gets a bit watery as it sets.  I've seen this happen with every batch I've made and even with the tabbouleh in the delis and stores, so it's nothing new.  You may want to drain a little, but it doesn't hurt not too.  Stirring it before you serves it helps too.  Tabbouleh is pretty resilient and tastes fresh even after a few days in the fridge.  However, if your as big of a fan as I am it won't need to last that long. 

You may notice that I don't include mint in my recipe.  This may be another heresy committed by the kitchen outlaw, but I found that mint is expensive, it bruises and spoils easy, and doesn't contribute a whole lot to the flavor.  I made several batches of tabbouleh without mint and I don't miss it. 

One of my hero celebrity chefs, I love how Alton Brown combines cooking, science, history, and sketch comedy into his show Good Eats on the Food Network.

1. Dig Me!

Yours truly, the kitchen outlaw!

 Positive and numerous responses to my posts on Facebook about my adventures in cooking inspired this blog.  While many of the entries I make will be about cooking, recipes, and such, I  think of it more as a very personal project about my recovery after almost a decade of health troubles.  I struggled with stroke, heart attack, heart failure, depression, mental breakdown, arthritis, back injury, obesity, high blood pressure, and a few other things throughout my thirties.  As of writing this entry I am just over a month away from turning 40.  I thought I was looking at an early death.  My back and hip pain coupled with serious fatigue made me think I faced a wheelchair or one of those Rascal scooters at least.  My regrets in life became apparent and I thought a lot about what I would have done with my life if I had more time.  However, just a month ago, I started getting better.

It probably had a lot to do with the hole in my pants.  They had a small tear in the rear, but the hole went from being a rogue-ish rip to a complete ass blowout.  They were the only pair of pants I owned that fit me.  I didn't have the money to buy new ones at the time.  Fortunately, my room mate quickly sewed a patch over the hole that night.  Yet, I knew the patch wouldn't last.  Not as a slight to her sewing skills but to the simple fact that my heavy weight makes for quite a bit of abuse on clothes, chairs, beds, etc.  What pissed me off is I have two brand new pairs of jeans that I never wore because I'm too big for them.  I ordered the biggest size I could find at the time and they were the same size as my current jeans.  I guess my jeans stretched as I grew in size.  Although I couldn't get the zipper all the way up on them.  So, this made me decide to start eating healthier and seriously commit to losing weight.  I know a million other things should have but I got some serious problems when it comes to things I should do.

Not too long after that, I made my first visit to my doctor in Cleveland (I moved here in February).  We had a long discussion about my health history, my current status, and trying to make a better future.  It lasted almost two hours.  He had me take a blood test before I left.  A couple of weeks later I received the results of the test in the mail and the results were very good considering what I was used to.  My sodium, potassium, and sugar levels were good.  I tested negative for hypothyroidism, which is a condition my mother has.  Best of all, my heart failure is in check.  The only bad thing is my cholestrol levels are high.  Overall, this is great news.  I hadn't heard such good news about my health since I started having these problems.

My next doctor visit was very positive.  We discussed many things I could do to keep improving my health.  A week from next Monday I have an appointment with a cardiologist and I'm going to get his opinion on what I can do for exercise.  Another huge hurdle was I lost 8 pounds since my last visit to the doctor (I went from 373 to 365).  Between problems with water retention and heart failure and my back and hip pain preventing me from moving around much, I hadn't lost weight in years.  However, some improvements in my diet helped.  

Not only that, but just less than a month ago, I noticed that a great deal of my back pain went away.  I can stand and walk longer than I have in years.  A few weeks ago, a friend wanted to take me on a tour of his neighborhood "Little Italy" here in Cleveland.  I told him I would try walking a block.  I did it with very little back pain and I didn't get nearly as tired as I'm used to.  I haven't walked a block in years.  

This thing started with healthy eating.  I don't have much income so I started cooking  my own dishes.  My mom told me she saw on TV Dr. Oz say that parsley helps fight water retention, which is cool because I love tabouli (Lebanese parsley salad).  However, it is exremely expensive to buy prepared.  I decided to make it myself and as it turns out I can make a lot of tabouli for less than the price of one of those 8 oz. tubs you can buy at the grocery store.  When I made my first batch it turned out so well I posted on Facebook about it and got some great feedback.  Every time I tried new dishes I'd get the same kind of comments.  Well, I find this very encouraging too.  As a result, this blog is a tool for this same kind of motivation.   

I'm not a formally trained cook but I come from a family that loves to cook.  From helping my mom and my Nana in the kitchen at a very young age to having to fend for myself as a latchkey kid, I have cooked in one way or another almost all my life.  I also learned quite a bit about cooking during my twenty year stint as a vegetarian.  I see this as more of a way of sharing my experiences with food and better health so I welcome anyone's tips and advice.  I will be somewhat confessional and frank in things I write about.  I try to be open minded but I have some strong opinions about some things that may appear here.  I don't mind some disagreement, but if you want to get nasty reserve your comments for somewhere else.  I don't have a set posting schedule for this blog but I will try to post at least two times a week.

Bruce Lee has been a hero of mine since I was a kid.  His life was short but amazing and he's a hell of an inspiration.  I may not quite reach this physique but I'll settle for an approximation.