Cooking Challenge 2010 - Linguine with Sausage and Cabbage

Linguine with Sausage and Cabbage
From Shape Magazine
Serves 4

2 chicken sausages (about 5 ounces total)
1 small red onion
1 4 ounce wedge of savoy cabbage (light green with crinkly leaves, milder flavor than green or red cabbage)
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1/4 teaspoon cornstarch
3 teaspoons olive oil, divided
1 cup reduced sodium chicken broth
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
12 ounces of linguine

Bring a large covered pot of water to boil over high heat. Reduce to low and simmer covered until ready to cook pasta. Meanwhile, cut sausage into 1/4 inch thick diagonal slices, slice onion to make 1/2 cup, and shred cabbage to make 3 cups. In a small bowl, mix vinegar and cornstarch.

Heat 2 teaspoons oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium high heat until hot but not smoking. Add sausage, reduce heat to medium, and cook 1 minute. Turn sausage and cook another minute. Add remaining 1 teaspoon oil, onion and cabbage and saute 1 minute. Add broth and 1/4 cup of cold water; bring to a boil over high heat. Stir in cornstarch mixture and pepper. Cook, stirring until liquid is a little glossy, about 30 seconds. Set aside.

Return pasta water to a boil over high heat. Add linguine and cook uncovered according to package directions -- about 2 minutes. Drain in a colander. Add drained pasta to sausage and sauce in skillet and toss gently to combine. Divide among four plates and serve immediately.

Here's the finished dish:

So, some thoughts.

• I need more cabbage. I used 1/4 of a head of savoy cabbage because I didn't want to have a ton of cabbage. I should have used more. And I think I overcooked it a little bit. It was my first time cooking cabbage ever, but the ones in the picture in the magazine looked super green. Mine? Not so much.
• I used chicken sausage with rosemary. Very nice flavor. But I should have browned it a little more. I was trying to follow the recipe exactly though (well, sort of). Next time, I know to cook the sausage until it's brown like I like it.
  
• Fresh pasta is the jumpoff. It's like ramen, but better. And the best kind of pasta ever created. I think it's going to be my new thing. Right after I finish cooking all of this boxed pasta I have.
• The other plus about this dish: it apparently supplies half of my daily folate needs!
  

Overall, I really liked this dish. I didn't eat all of it because I put way too much pasta in it and I wanted more cabbage. But I will definitely make this again in the future. Shoot, I might give it another shot this week. I've got leftover pasta, onion and cabbage. And I think I've got some chicken sausage in the fridge!

Rating: **** (4 out of 5 stars)

Cooking Challenge 2010 - Gorgonzola Stuffed Potatoes (Week 1)

The first recipe is in! This week we will make Gorgonzola Stuffed Potatoes. Feel free to try it and post your findings, reactions or comments! When I make it, I'll post photos and my reaction as well. Enjoy!

Gorgonzola Stuffed Potatoes

Makes 6

(from Katie Brown's Workshop)

Ingredients

6 medium sized Yukon gold or red skinned potatoes
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons salt
6 pieces of aluminum foil
1/3 cup gorgonzola or blue cheese
1 teaspoon pepper
1/3 cup heavy cream
¼ cup chopped chives for garnish (optional)

Get Cookin'
1. Preheat oven to 350º F.

2. Wash and dry potatoes, and place in large mixing bowl. Toss with vegetable oil and salt. Wrap each potato individually with aluminum foil. Place potatoes onto baking sheet and bake for approximately 45 minutes, or until toothpick is inserted with ease.

3. Remove potatoes from the oven, remove foil, and allow them to cool enough to touch.

4. With a knife, cut quarter sized holes in the top of each potato and discard tops. With a small spoon, hallow out each potato. Reserve the potato flesh in a separate medium size mixing bowl. Make sure to leave some potato around the inside edges to help keep the shape.

5. Mix gorgonzola, pepper, and heavy cream with the potato. Stuff the potato shells with the mixture, mounding each potato with the mixture.

6. Return potatoes to a sheet tray and place under broiler. Remove from oven when golden or at about five minutes.

MY THOUGHTS
So, I forgot to take pics of this dish, but overall, I was underwhelmed. I was rushing and the one potato I ate wasn't done enough. I wish I'd added butter or something because it was a little on the dry side. However, I fixed the other potato (properly cooked) for someone else and they said it was alright when mashed with the rest of the potatoes.

If I try this again, I would probably doctor it up in some way.

RATING: *1/2 stars out of 5 stars

T-Dot's Eating Manifesto

I'm tired. It's only 12 days into the new year and I'm already tired.

It didn't come from the high butter dishes over Christmas. This fatigue set in since the New Year began. And I think it has a lot to do with my diet.

I'm a notoriously bad eater. I love to cook, but I'm also lazy, settling for fast food, conveniences and we all know I love some Ramen.

I think it's starting to catch up to me. That, and my lack of sleep. But that's another post.

So I figure what could it hurt to eat a little more healthfully? A little more whole? A little more like Setta B?

I browsed through Food Rules, the new hype book about how we should eat. The advice is boiled down essentially to this rule: "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables."

Sounds easy enough. A flip through the book suggests eating plants -- not anything that was made in a plant. I thought about that book as I drove home from work today. I'd slugged through the last 4 hours of work, even after I'd had half a salad with rotisserie chicken breast for lunch.

I wasn't up to cooking (really, the tub is calling my name) so I considered ordering out or *gasp* making some Ramen, though I knew it wasn't good for me. On the ride home, I vowed to myself that I'd buy real food when I went to the store to reup my pantry. Though I wondered to myself what I would do when I got home.

Women's Health to the rescue. A few months ago, they released an issue with the best packaged foods for women. I'm a fan of the magazine, and I'm all for making small changes with big results, so I picked up a few. An antioxident veggie blend was served with baked salmon and risotto a few days ago. And today, I'm pulling out a stir fry mix with noodles and cooking it with shrimp and some soy sauce.

My plans to be healthier, this time, were actually backed up by my eating habits. I've been doing better on drinking more water (64 ounces a day, playa!).

Anyway, I've decided I need to get a little more serious about eating well. Here are a few of the things I'm going to try to do:

• Eat few foods with ingredients that I can't pronounce.
• Buy fresh. If not possible, buy frozen. Not canned.
  
• More water, less juice.
  
• Eat veggies and protein as often as possible (no more Ramen solo for dinner!)
• Eat the fruit instead of drinking the juice. If drinking juice, check the ingedient list

This is evolving as I learn. If you have suggestions, let me know. I'll keep you guys updated on my progress.

• 
  

Make me over...

In other news, I'm getting restless.

I might either try to redesign the look of the site, or move it to my professional site so I only have to update one of them.

And I need a Web cam. Sigh.

I'll keep you posted.

Cooking Challenge 2010

I'm getting some help from some friends of mine to accomplish my goal of cooking more new things this year. A bunch of us have gotten together and decided that we'll do an e-mail chain with a new recipe each week. We'll post the recipe one day and the rest of us have a week to prepare the dish. Then, we weigh in with our thoughts on the dish, suggestions for preparation, etc.

Well, lucky readers, I'm going to share that wonderful bounty with you.

I can't guarantee the dishes will necessarily be healthy. I can't guarantee you'll like them. But I can guarantee they will provide different dishes than you've currently been preparing at your home. For my contributions, I'm going to turn to the bounty of cookbooks I received for Christmas for inspiration.

I invite you to cook along with us if the recipe strikes your fancy, and weigh in with your thoughts!

First recipe comes Wednesday!!

In 2010 I will:

Happy New Year, everyone!

A couple of resolutions you guys can help keep me honest about:

1. Try at least one new recipe a month. I tried this before last year with the Healthy Recipe (and slacked off, quite honestly) and I liked doing it. Plus, I got like, no lie -- a million (okay, like 7) cookbooks for Christmas this year and I'm dying to try some new recipes from them. They won't all be healthy, but they will be tasty, I'm sure. Just for Christmas alone, I made baked macaroni and cheese and candied yams with pecans that I pretty much love. They have like a whole stick of butter in each of them, but they are SOOO good. So I can't commit to only cooking healthfully, but I can commit to cooking food that seems interesting and looks like it will be tasty to me. And I'll share the successful recipes with you, dear readers.
2. Take pictures to document life and stretch my creative muscles. I took some pics for my photography class last year, and honestly, I can say that I miss doing that since my class ended. I am going to give myself some assignments and post some of the results on this blog (and/or my professional blog) to keep me honest and give me a creative outlet. I may also just include more snapshots that I take on a general basis.
3. Find an organization to volunteer with and do so, regularly. Can either be one organization with a long term commitment, or various organizations with one time commitments.
   
4. Eat out at new restaurants. Use this time to try different cuisines and experiment. Setta B. said she would help me with this when I come visit her in NYC. YAY! I don't want to put a time restriction on this one because it is a recession and I'm saving up for grad school, so I can't afford to just eat out all the time.
   
5. Exercise! I'd like to restart running so that I can run in the summer. And I should also look into taking a class at a gym to combat my boredom and general dislike of routine workout equipment.
6. Sit up straight. This is a recurring problem for me. I've started today thinking of myself as a descendant of a tree. So whenever I catch myself slouching, I imagine that I'm a tree to remind me to sit up straight. You don't see slouched trees too often. Not a perfect system, but it's at least getting me thinking about it. So if you see me in real life, and you notice me slouching, "tell me to be the tree" -- or just tell me to stop slouching.
   

Here's to a better me in 2010!