"What are you thankful for?"

Thanksgiving is one of those very strange holidays celebrated in America. In my mind, it's a lot like Columbus Day: distorted and misunderstood.

The history major that still lives inside me would love to make this entire blog post about Thanksgiving's fascinating past (really, it is). However, if you get me rolling on misrepresented things in history, I may not stop. So I'll spare you the lecture, and instead address the one thing I do very much respect the holiday for: providing an opportunity to reflect on our lives and express gratitude.

And on that note, a list of the top ten things I am thankful for (you knew it was coming).

1. My family, and their constant support and encouragement.
2. My friends, new and old.
3. My boyfriend, who has the incredible talent of being/saying/doing whatever I need at that moment.
4. The opportunity to be in graduate school.
5. My assistantship.
6. Having a place to live at school, and also a true home.
7. My car, because I don't know what I'd do without it.
8. My health.
9. Delicious food that I am going to enjoy tomorrow, and that I have available to me every day.
10. My cat and dog because they are just too adorable to be left off the list.

Mushroom and Spinach Quiche

Mushroom and spinach quiche!

Lately, I've been having a craving for quiche. I saw some posts on Facebook about the International Dinner coming up at Mount Union, and it made me remember the really amazing mushroom quiche they had there last year representing French cuisine. Perhaps, in some small way, the craving was my expression of homesickness for my alma mater.

Anyway, I've never made a quiche before but I thought this would be a good time to try it out. I had a lot of mozzarella cheese left over from making pizza a few weekends ago and a few other odds and ends lying around. It was easier than I expected and pretty delicious. I think next time I'd use  a mix of mozzarella and cheddar or something similar to give it more flavor.

The recipe I (somewhat loosely) used for my quiche came from my Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 15th edition, an insanely large cookbook that seems to have just about everything in it. (It's a great book to have!) Their recipe started with a pie crust--either buy one or make it yourself. Since I've never made a pie crust before, I opted to use Bisquick's recipe. It wasn't quite enough to cover the pan, so I think next time I'd make a batch and a half.

Bisquick Pie Crust

The baked Bisquick crust.

Ingredients

1/4 cup butter, softened
1 cup Bisquick mix
2-3 tbsp boiling water

Steps

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. 
2. Combine butter and Bisquick in a bowl (I used a fork for this). Add water (start with 2 tbsp) and mix vigorously until dough forms. Flour your hands and press the dough into a 9-inch pie dish.
3. Bake for 8-10 minutes until golden. 

And now, for the quiche. I'm giving you the recipe as I made it, which is again, somewhat different from the cookbook.

Mushroom and Spinach Quiche

The uncooked quiche.

Ingredients

1 small onion, chopped
1 container of sliced mushrooms
3 cups loosely packed, coarsely chopped fresh spinach
1 tbsp vegetable oil
5 eggs
1 1/4 cup milk
1/4 tsp salt
Dash ground nutmeg (optional)
6 ounces shredded cheese
1 tbsp all-purpose flour

Steps

1. Bake your crust, and turn down the oven temperature to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Cook the onion and mushrooms in vegetable oil until tender, stirring occasionally. Stir in the spinach and turn off the heat, allowing it to wilt just slightly.
3. Crack the eggs into a glass measuring cup and lightly beat with a fork. You want 1/2 cup of total liquid per egg, so add milk (or half-and-half or light cream) until you have 2 1/2 cups of eggs and milk. Pour into a large mixing bowl.
4. Combine cheese and flour in a small bowl (it's easiest to just use your hands for this). Add to the egg mixture and mix well. Add the mushroom mixture and mix well. Pour into the pie shell.
5. Bake for 50-55 minutes, until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Let sit for 10 minutes before slicing. Serves 6-8.

Ta-dah! Delicious quiche.

Some Thoughts on Web Design

If you had told me six months ago that by November I would have coded a website by hand, I would told you that was crazy. Web design? Me? I'm not so sure about that.

But, strangely enough, that is the case. Web design turned out to be a required course for my program, so I enrolled this quarter, and as of a few days ago, I have actually coded a website by hand.

I know that in today's internet-driven society, that isn't much of a feat. There are millions of people who beat me to it. But despite that, I am proud of it. It isn't super cool or fancy, and it doesn't have a bunch of neat features, but it works, and I made it do that. And if you ask me, that's still pretty cool.

In the beginning, I felt like one of the most clueless people in the course. I had no idea what the heck any of those acronyms that people kept throwing around meant (CSS, W3C, etc.) and I was intimidated by all that had to do with web design. However, once I got past my confusion and fear and forced myself to jump off the high dive, I actually picked it up fairly quickly. I'm not claiming to know or understand every bit of HTML and CSS (because I certainly don't!), but I think I've come very far in the past couple of weeks.

I'm also enjoying the fact that it's something new. I haven't done much academic work in the past few years aside from the familiar routine of read, research, and write a paper. It's sort of nice to do something different, and something that's challenging in a new way.

I don't know if I'll ever need to apply these skills in my professional life, but being forced to acquire them has been a rewarding experience. It's always good to get out of your comfort zone, and if nothing else, at least my blog looks a little better because of it. ;-)

French Onion Soup: An Exercise in Improvisation

The finished product.

I'm not an "improv" type of person. When I was in band back in high school, you'd never catch me making up a jazzy solo on an instrument; I stuck to the music. The same goes for cooking; I follow the recipe.

The problem is that I'm no longer cooking for the 4-6 people most recipes serve. I'm usually just cooking for myself so a lot of my favorite recipes have to be pared down, and sometimes you just have to do away with the recipe altogether.

Hence, this afternoon's improvisation: French onion soup.

I had some beef broth left over from last week's Italian wedding soup, so when I came across this super simple recipe for French onion soup from The Kitchn, I decided to use it up. My recipe is a conglomeration of the above and this one from How to Cook Like Your Grandmother (and maybe a few others mixed in).

Excuse the lack of precise measurements--this is improv, after all.

French Onion Soup (serves one very hungry grad student)

Ingredients:

1 medium onion, sliced into thin strips
2 tbsp butter
Some minced garlic and/or other seasonings
A pinch of salt (if your butter is salted I would skip this)
A splash of wine
Some beef broth
Some water

Optional (for topping): Bread, Cheese

Steps:

Add broth, bring to a boil, and simmer.

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the onions, salt (if using), and garlic/seasonings.
2. Choose to stir or not stir. Some recipes say to give everything a quick stir right away to coat it in butter, while others say to let it be and stir once the onions start to turn translucent.
3. Cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until they caramelize and turn a nice brown color. The Kitchn says to not let the onions burn; Cook Like Your Grandmother says it's ok if some of them burn a little. Choose your own adventure.
4. Remove the pan from the heat, add a splash of wine, and stir. (Most recipes say to use a dry wine, but I used white zinfandel and it was fine.) Return to the stove and cook for a few minutes until most of the liquid is gone.
5. Add the beef broth. I had about 1 1/2 cups, so I added that with half a cup of water.
6. Bring the soup to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until it has reduced and looks good to eat. (The Kitchn recommends at least half and hour; I could only wait about 20 minutes). Season with salt and pepper if necessary.
7. Optional: Toast a piece of bread in the oven/toaster oven until sufficiently toasty. You want to dry it out as much as possible without burning it. Put soup in an oven-safe bowl, top with the "crouton" and cheese (I used provolone) and put it under the broiler or in the toaster oven until the cheese has melted.

The Verdict: Despite the fact that I was very impatient and didn't simmer the soup as long as I probably should have, this was pretty decent French onion soup and it filled me up.

Things I'd Do Differently:

• Don't burn the onions. Really, don't. You will later taste the burned, charred bits in your soup (which is not something I particularly care for--maybe you're ok with it, though). Perhaps the taste would have been diminished with a longer simmer time.
• Use "good" bread for the crouton. The Kroger Lite Wheat sandwich bread was ok, but it got very soggy very fast. This would have been better with a denser, crustier bread.

So, there you have it. An improvised soup easily adapted to whatever you have on hand, as long as that includes onions and some kind of broth. Cheap, simple, and pretty darn delicious.

Bread and Soup

Italian wedding soup and ciabatta bread

It's finally feeling like fall to me down here in Cincinnati. We had our first real frost this week and the scarves and sweaters and UGGs are starting to come out of the woodwork. I'm a little nervous about winter because I live in a drafty old house, but the radiators kicked on this week and I've discovered that pointing a fan at mine really does wonders for heating up the room. I'm comforted by that and the thought that the city only gets a couple of inches of snow at a time--huzzah!

But, as we're moving towards cooler weather my culinary adventures are started to tend toward winter-y foods. Like bread. And soup. Both of which you can see in the above picture. This was my second time making Italian wedding soup, and my very first time making ciabatta!

If you have ever felt intimidated by breadmaking, let me suggest this recipe from Lifehack: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/kitchen-hack-one-minute-ciabatta-bread.html. It sounds almost too good to be true, but it works and you get tasty, tasty bread out of it. I made a mistake with mine and added 1tsp of yeast instead of 1/4 tsp so it was ready to bake in about two hours instead of eight. The resulting bread doesn't have the big airy pockets like you usually see in ciabatta, but it was extremely easy and still very delicious. Especially hot out of the oven with some butter... mmmmmm.

But of course, the bread was just one side of the equation. Soup was the other. I've been thinking about this Italian wedding soup for a while, and I finally gathered all of the ingredients. Contrary to popular belief, the soup has nothing to do with weddings; the name supposedly refers to the "marriage" of meat and vegetables. And I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that it isn't from Italy either. Oh well. Meatballs and pasta = close enough?

Here is the recipe that I use. It makes A TON of soup, so I'd suggest making a half batch like I did this week.

Ingredients:

2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup seasoned breadcrumbs
1 lb ground beef
1 lb Italian sausage (Bob Evans is good!)
3 medium carrots, sliced (I'm not a huge fan of cooked carrots so I never use this much)
3 celery ribs, diced
1 large onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 tbsp olive oil
4 cans reduced-sodium chicken broth
2 cans beef broth (I go reduced-sodium here too)
1 10-oz package frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
1/4 cup fresh minced basil or 2 tbsp dry
1 envelope onion soup mix
1 1/2 tbsp ketchup
1/2 tsp dried thyme
3 bay leaves
1 1/2 cups uncooked pasta (like macaroni or penne)

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine eggs and breadcrumbs in a large bowl. Crumble beef and sausage over mixture and combine. Form into 3/4" meatballs.
2. Place meatballs on a foil-lined cookie sheet (with sides) and bake for 15-18 minutes until no longer pink. Drain on paper towels.
3. Meanwhile, saute carrots, celery, onion, and garlic in olive oil in a Dutch oven or soup kettle until tender. Add broth, spinach, basil, soup mix, ketchup, thyme, and bay leaves.
4. Bring the soup to a boil and add the meatballs. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes.
5. Add the pasta and cook for 13-15 minutes longer, until tender, stirring occasionally. Discard bay leaves before serving.

Makes 10 servings or 2 1/2 quarts.

And there you have it! The perfect autumn / winter meal: bread and soup.

Leaves & Wings

Autumn leaves falling,
falling,
falling,
like so many responsibilities
drifting toward me
on an October breeze,
so numerous
that I cannot catch them all.

I prefer the summertime
when the wings of opportunity
light upon and carry me
gently
as a painted butterfly.