The Omnivore's One Hundred

From British food blogger Andrew Wheeler's blog, Very Good Taste, a challenge:

"Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results."

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (I had to look; a pungent cheese from France)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream (My absolute favorite gelato flavor)
21. Heirloom tomatoes (waiting impatiently for some to ripen in our yard now, actually)
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl(a staple on the Oregon coast)
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear (if you count a prickly pear margarita last week in Sedona)
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips (to my eternal regret)
61. S’mores (made 'em from scratch once, marshmallows, graham crackers, and all. In my days of dessert escalation, cooking for my weekly Stitch'n'Bitch group).
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (all of the above, love beignets the most)
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost (A very odd man I knew in my early 20s, who came several times to our family Thanksgiving dinner, brought this one year as his odd contribution to the meal. Another year he just brought a bag of arugula).
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict (embarassingly for my friends, I love this dish, but order it without the eggs)
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse (and no..I just can't).
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

I scored a decent 52...

Ellie Krieger's Chicken Sate with Spicy Peanut Sauce

Trying to get back on to the blogging horse here, and will start with just posting a quick link to a fabulous recipe we tried tonight. My sister introduced me to Ellie Krieger's recipes; I've never seen her show, but you can access her recipes, which manage to be both tasty and healthy, on foodnetwork.com. I started with her Nutty Sweet Potato Soup, which is very rich and flavorful, and moved on to this recipe tonight.

Follow the link for the recipe; I made it largely as written, though didn't have shallots and substituted green curry paste for red. Served over brown rice cooked in broth and a little light coconut milk. Oh, didn't have the energy to fire up the grill, so cut the chicken into chunks to marinate and sauteed in a little vegetable oil. Thinned the peanut sauce with a little more coconut milk (the one drawback I found to the recipe was that it only used 1/2 a cup of coconut milk, leaving most the can. I've had good luck freezing it in the past but didn't really want to bother tonight). Also sauteed a bunch of lettuce with some soy sauce and sesame oil and sesame seeds; a good way to get rid of the lettuce we have exploding out of our garden.

We loved this recipe-David couldn't get enough of it. It tastes very rich, especially since it's calculated to be only 250 calories a serving.

Chicken Sate with Spicy Peanut Sauce

Day 8 of My Captivity

And my captor shows no sign of letting me go. Her random punishments strike suddenly (vomiting everything we've coaxed her to eat over the last 18 hours, shrieking "My Outside!") and leave me cowed, flinching, and hyper-vigilant. Attempted to escape to the office yesterday. She allowed me to get about 10 miles from home, then, when I could sense freedom, she threw up all over the car seat, forcing me to turn back for home. Don't know how much longer I can go on.

Yesterday, all she had to eat for the first half of the day was ketchup. I am not exaggerating.

She has been sick for eight days, and can't have dairy until things are much more stable (unless I want to be peeling twelve hour digested dairy off my work clothes again). She weighs less than 24 pounds, when healthy, and will be two in less than a month. She's starving, but nothing sounds good.

Here's how things are going:

"Food, pease (vigorously rubbing chest in sign for "please", making winning smile".
"Ok! Do you want some toast?"
"No, food pease!!"
"Toast IS food. Do you want some cereal?"
"NO! Food PEEEASE!!!!"
"Cereal IS food (growing increasingly desperate). How about an apple? Banana? Jello? Popsicle? Tortilla? Raisin? Baloney? Carrot? Potato? Oatmeal?"
"NO!! FOOD!!"
By this time, one of us is lying on the floor crying.

Then I just open the fridge door and let her stare, hoping she'll find something she'll eat. Maybe I should just get honest and buy one of the Republicans' "My Carbon Footprint is Bigger Than Yours" bumperstickers.

I love to eat and cook food that tastes good, that is made of high quality and flavorful ingredients, that's locally grown when possible. But it's hard to be a slow food advocate when you'd give anything if your toddler would just swallow some freaking blue jello already.

Orange Vanilla (Cornstarch) Ice Cream, Bittman Style

I know! I know! I've been horrible about posting. No excuse, but it's the new year, and we're back from traveling to Hawaii and to the mountains, and I'm ready to settle in and cook.

And really, we're working on cooking healthier meals, after the obvious holiday indulgence. I'll post later about creamy low fat vegetable soups, thanks to the new immersion blender I'm loving. I also have thoughts about the local food movement, and the dilemmas I've been occasionally encountering around eating well, eating organic food, or eating locally. Also a post for another day.

Today is ice cream. It's pouring, and 38 degrees, but we still wanted ice cream. I always want ice cream. My mom gave me a new countertop freezer for my birthday, the kind with an insert that you keep in the freezer, and I wanted to give it a try. I'd been hearing about Mark Bittman's cornstarch variation of the traditional egg-based custard recipes, and that had me very curious.

You can read the full article Bittman wrote about this recipe. In short, cornstarch is cooked with milk or cream and sugar, then flavorings are added, the mixture is chilled and then frozen. Since there are no eggs, the ice cream is lower calorie, and the flavor is theoretically cleaner, less "eggy".

My favorite homemade ice cream ever is the Orange Cream Deam from the Ben and Jerry's recipe book, which is a vanilla ice cream with orange juice concentrate blended in. I thought we'd try something similar here, and it worked very well. This ice cream is unbelievable smooth and creamy, without the normal graininess that you expect with homemade ice cream. I actually think I prefer the more textured traditional recipe, but this is pretty damn fantastic (and only about 20 minutes of hands on work).

Orange Vanilla Ice Cream

*2 1/2 cups milk, cream or half-and-half (I used about 1 cup cream, the rest milk); divided
*1/2 cup sugar
*pinch of salt
*3 TBS corn starch
*1 tsp vanilla
*about 1/4 c. frozen orange juice concentrate, thawed (more or less to taste) but cold .

-Mix 2 cups of the milk/cream, the sugar, and the salt in a saucepan. Heat over medium low heat, stirring frequently, until mixture begins to steam.
-Meanwhile, mix the remaining milk/cream and the corn starch with a fork until no lumps remain.
-Whisk the cornstarch mixture into the saucepan, increase heat to medium, and heat until it barely boils, stirring constantly. As soon as it begins to boil, turn heat all the way down and continue stirring for another five minutes or so, until nice and thick.
-Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.
-Leave in sauce pan and place pan in a bowl filled with ice and water (make sure, of course, that your water isn't so deep that it overflows into the custard). Let it chill, stirring frequently, until it's cold all the way through. If you have more time, you can chill in the fridge, but don't forget to stir often or a skin will form.
-When chilled, stir in the thawed but cold orange concentrate. Start with just a couple of tablespoons and taste as you go.
-Pour into your freezer and chill per instructions.

Navy Bean Soup

I've made a couple of runs at this soup, as it's one of David's favorites, but hadn't found a recipe we really loved until this one. And hey, it was the simplest one I tried! It's also very adaptable, fitting well with our goal of cooking for the next week with only what we already have in the house. It'd be a good Crockpot recipe, but was too much to fit in mine, so it simmered on the stove all through this cold afternoon. We had a few hours of October sunshine today, but the afternoon ended dark and drizzling, so soup and corn bead and applesauce were perfect. Mary wasn't here for dinner, but Else, now a year and a half, devoured it.

Notes: I had no celery or carrot, but added a little celery seed. I like the addition of the chopped spinach quite a bit, but you could omit. We used 3 smoked bratwurst and the flavor was fabulous. If doing in a Crockpot, I'd soak the beans on the stove, then add with tomatoes to the Crockpot and put on high while sauteing the vegetables, then add everything to the Crockpot. I'd suggest cooking for a few hours on high then turning down to low, but you might want to cook part of the time with the lid off so it cooks down a bit. You probably wouldn't add the entire 3 cups of water, either, if going this route. Like most bean soups, this should freeze very well. It makes a really large amount, easily enough for a meal for six.

Navy Bean Soup
*1 lb. of dried Navy beans, rinsed
*6 cups of water
*1 TBS Better than Bouillon, Chicken, OR a couple bouillon cubes
(OR sub 3 cups of chicken broth for 3 cups of the water)
*1 TBS olive oil
*1 onion, chopped
*2 stalks celery, chopped
*2 carrots, chopped
*3 cloves garlic, minced
*1/2 lb ham, chopped OR 3 smoked bratwurst, sliced into thin rounds OR 6 slices bacon, chopped
*1 14.5 oz can chopped tomatoes, with juice
*2 TBS Worcestershire sauce
*1 bay leaf
*3 more cups of water
*Chopped fresh parsley, 2 TBS or so
*Chopped baby spinach, a cup or two, or one small container frozen chopped spinach
*lots of black pepper, salt to taste

-Cover beans with a generous amount of water; bring to a boil then let them sit and soak for an hour. Drain.
-Towards the end of that hour, heat olive oil in large soup pot over medium heat. Add chopped onions, celery, carrot and your choice of meat. Saute until the onions are golden. Add garlic and saute a few minutes more, watching closely to make sure the garlic doesn't burn.
-Add beans to pot, along with tomatoes, Worcestershire, and bay leaf. Bring to a boil then reduce heat to simmer and simmer, covered, for 2 hours.
-Remove lid from pot and add 3 more cups water. Bring back to a simmer and simmer, uncovered, for another two hours.
-During the last few minutes, add chopped parsley and spinach. Add pepper to taste. Don't salt it until you've tasted it, as this will be pretty salty already with the Worcestershire and ham.

Blueberry Vanilla Syrup

Just a brief post today-I had to write this recipe out anyway to post on discussion of canning and putting food by on Chowhound.com, so thought I'd cut and paste it here.

We love blueberries. We are blessed to live in Oregon, with an abundance of local, amazingly good, inexpensive produce available to us six months out of the year. It's actually a fairly painful blessing sometimes, as the produce pours in and it's very challenging to keep up with it all. I have wanted to cry, some days, coming home from work, standing in the kitchen with a toddler hanging from my leg, looking at ten pounds of cucumbers that must be made into pickles tonight or they'll go bad. I love the results of canning: the jars lined up on the counter, the feeling of concrete satisfaction, the smugness of being prepared when the next Depression hits (something everyone in my family seems to worry about subconsciously: will there be enough food? We might all die!). I just sometimes don't like the actual work of canning: the endless wait for the water to boil, then come back to a boil; the sticky disaster the kitchen becomes; the jars that slip back into the boiling water and splash.

This recipe is a welcome break from all that. You get the satisfaction of canning with much less work. First, you start with blueberries. Blueberries are the best U-Pik fruit, because you can throw them into the freezer without doing anything else. When you're ready to use them, rinse the frost, pick out a few stems and you're good to go. We have a great organic farm a few minutes from our house, so the whole family can eat as many as we want while picking (though have to make a side note here and say the blueberry farm was being run by the Blueberry Nazi this year, which put a bit of a damper on our experience: You don't park there! No kids in the trees! No kids in the bathrooms! Don't pick there! No soup for you! You come back one year!). Back to the recipe. The other great thing about it is you don't have to process it once the jars are filled, thus eliminating the whole boiling water heating time sink. The downside of that is that you must keep the finished product refrigerated, but that's not a big deal as you'll probably only keep one or two jars for yourself and give the rest away. As good as it is, there's only so much syrup you can go through on your own.

Find your vanilla beans in bulk if you can. The ones sold in a jar at the supermarket are insanely expensive.

This recipe is a modification of a Sheila Lukins recipe from the fabulous U.S.A. Cookbook.

1 1/2 lbs blueberries
3 c sugar
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
3/4 c. water
2 TBS fresh lemon juice

Combine blueberries (rinsed) and sugar in a large heavy saucepan. Toss gently with a rubber spatula. Stick vanilla bean in center. Let stand for an hour (you can start w/frozen berries-just prolong this step).

Add water and lemon juice and bring to a boil over high heat, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat and simmer, skimming foam, until it starts to thicken. It will take 15 minutes or so. It will continue to thicken as it cools so don't cook too long.

Remove from heat and strain through a fine sieve. Cool (taste when cool-if too sweet, add a little more lemon juice) and funnel into sterilized bottles. Although she says it will keep up to two months, I've found that it keeps indefinitely, refrigerated.

Unlike most canning recipes, you can double this one. Everything will take longer, but it works fine.

It's a gorgeous deep blue color-very pretty to give in nice stoppered bottles (the kind with a wire cage and rubber gasket-this is insanely messy stuff, so don't give it in a bottle with a cork). As mentioned previously, it's beautiful on ice cream, delicious on waffles, and my brother-in-law has had great success basting salmon with it when grilling.

Grilled Chicken, Red Onion, and Mint Kebabs

Apparently, the only break I took to show me that it was summer time was to completely stop updating my blog. (Man, that was pathetic, and completely untrue. Although I didn't take much time off this summer, we still had a very languid summer-as much as one can have with a job and two children). Still, it seemed a waste to spend any precious summer minutes in front of the computer, and so, though we cooked and ate some really wonderful food this summer, I didn't write about it. Since my main purpose with this blog is to keep track of my favorite recipes, I need to start searching my brain and remembering the new dishes that we loved.

This one is easy to remember and to tell you about, since I'm just going to link directly to the epicurious.com recipe. It's an astonishingly simple dish that is one of the best things I've made in a long time. The mint and red onions are both essential: the mint leaves get wonderfully crispy, the red onion all charred and sweet. I finish with just a squeeze of lemon juice over the kebabs, rather than basting with olive oil and lemon juice. Both ways would be fantastic; mine has a few less calories; their's is probably a little moister (do be careful not to overcook your chicken). We love this with brown rice or pita, tzatziki, and a greek salad (recipes for the latter two to follow one of these days).

Add this to the category of food you will eat in spite of the fact that it's healthy, not to be virtuous.

Oh, and funny thing-my sister was up recently from Arizona, and we wanted to cook dinner for our folks' anniversary. Guess what she suggested? Yep....apparently excruciatingly good taste DOES run in our family.

Grilled Chicken, Red Onion, and Mint Kebabs.