#kitchncure Day 1: Fridge and Freezer Edition

You know how when you spend time traveling, things start to slip? Well, I've been home for something like three weekends since the beginning of May, and one of the things that's slipped is the kitchen. Cleaning it out and up has become a big job. The Kitchn Cure 2013 is just what the doctor ordered.

It's an online autumn group clean-up. It goes like this: you take "before" shots of your kitchen, especially problem areas. Each day this week The Kitchn e-mails you a "to-do" for the kitchen and you set aside about an hour to do it, then you photograph it and share for bragging rights.

I'm in for anything that will turn this job into bite-sized chunks. So I'm in.

Today's job was de-clutter and clean the fridge and freezer. Hoo boy.

Quick and easy: Eggs baked in marinara

It's cold in Ottawa. I finally turned on the furnace just to bump it back up to 20 degrees in the house. Coming from Southwest Ontario turning on the furnace in September seems crazy, but there you go. Brrr.

At any rate, yogurt was not going to cut it for breakfast this morning. I thought back to my favourite brunch when I lived in Windsor: eggs diablo at Rino's Kitchen and Ale House, and decided that the morning is a perfectly acceptable time to eat baked eggs - normally a quick and easy weeknight dinner.

I've tried to simplify this recipe further by putting the tomatoes and ingredients straight into the oven to heat up rather than starting with a sauce, but it's just not the same.

There are a ton of variations you can do with this. Want it spicy? Add sliced hot peppers or extra chili flakes to the sauce. Want it cheesy? Add some goat's cheese or ricotta. You can top the finished product with feta or shaved Parmesan... but keep it simple. Overdoing it with a marinara sauce is never a good idea.

This is great served with crusty bread, slightly stale pitas (or, you know, fresh, but I sort of like it with stale ones), or toast. I scale this recipe up and down with no problems.

CORN! bread, cakes, and muffins.

Sometimes there's something you eat for your whole life and it gives you a great "goes with lots of things!" recipe. One of my mom's standby recipes when we were growing up was a quick version of chili that she always served with cornmeal muffins. The cornmeal muffins are quite simple, so there are all sorts of things you can do with them! The base recipe is:

Dry:
1 cup flour
1 cup cornmeal
1/3 cup sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
Wet:
1 cup milk
1/3 cup salad oil
1 egg
(It's all ones and threes, so I've had it memorized for years.) Whisk the dry, whisk the wet, stir them together until they're combined, then put the batter into greased or sprayed muffin tins and bake at 425F for 20-25 minutes, until golden brown on top!

Eggplant Steakwiches

Glorious, glorious summer is upon us, and with it all of the delicious things that grow. Since my mom produced this recipe for eggplant "steaks" from Chatelaine magazine years ago it has been my favourite summer recipe, and it makes either a great meatless main dish or (with smaller eggplant slices) a fancy side. Maybe with meat steaks!

Come to think of it, you could also serve them as a warm salad course, assuming you've got a main to follow it. 'Cause it's fancy for a salad.

Take it easy: Grilled mahi-mahi and pineapple with potato wedges.

I've been missing, I know. I was finishing the coursework for my MA (done!) and got so busy I didn't even have enough time to procrastinate. Of course that isn't the same as saying I didn't have time to cook. My fellow MA candidates often asked how I could cook so often when it takes so much time. And oh, can it ever, but there are a lot of quick meals out there, too. Memorize a couple and keep the ingredients on hand and excuses to reach for prepackaged stuff start to disappear.

Pre-tossing. Fish is on the bottom..

Last night we were a bit rushed because we wanted to see Silver Linings Playbook (So good, by the way. See it!) and needed to squish dinner in there. Enter grilled mahi-mahi and pineapple.

I can't remember exactly how this became a staple meal for us, but I think it has something to do with a fish taco recipe that used very similar seasonings to my favourite grilled pineapple marinade: cilantro, garlic, and chiles (or crushed red pepper) chopped together, then mixed with olive oil, salt and pepper. Toss it over fish and pineapple. If there's some extra pineapple juice I add that, too.

On why our notion of "creepy" in food is all messed up.

A friend shared this article with me, on how North American attitudes toward offal illustrate a possibly disturbing trend in our attitude toward food. The whole article is worth reading but the following parts were my favourites:

Pan-Seared Octopus with Bean Salad

We were just away for the weekend and I spent today decompressing. It was the perfect day to try a new ingredient.

Pre-braise.

Enter: octopus.

This year we went to Nashville for New Years Eve and while we were there we made sure to visit City House in hopes of trying their crispy octopus. We had no luck getting the octopus (but lots of luck getting delicious appetizers) so I have been looking for something similar to try at home.

I had one of those cylindrical frozen, pre-cleaned packs of octopus tentacles in the freezer and I've been waiting for a chance to use it and decided today was the day. I thawed it to commit myself and went on the hunt for a recipe.

I found this recipe on SBS Food. It looked promising, so I made a few changes and got to work.

The octopus is braised first, then seared and served atop a lovely white bean salad. The suggested braising time is 45 minutes but cooked it for twice as long before reaching a tenderness I could work with, so leave yourself some time.

Seared on the bean salad.

Because the braise took so long for me I'd be interested to try this again either with fresh octopus to see if it takes less time or in a slow cooker to get things very tender and maybe infuse more of the flavours from the braise into the meat.

Since it's going to be seared I don't see why you couldn't braise ahead of time then heated through during the searing process when you're ready to eat.