Saturday, January 24, 2009

This week in food

Perhaps you've figured out by now that I'm a bit obsessed with food and creating things. This week I tried out three new recipes, listed below in order of preference:

This was seriously good. I've never made real chile rellenos, and only started to eat them about a year ago. This recipe captures the essence of the dish, but modifies it so that rather than battering and frying the stuffed chiles, you instead bake them in yummy fluffy eggy goodness. I omitted the chorizo, and instead stuffed the chiles with a combination of cheddar jack and feta cheese. The feta added a really nice flavor and a less melty texture to the stuffing. This will be made again many times over.

Quinoa Vegetable Paella
If you aren't yet familiar with quinoa, I would recommend checking it out. It is similar to cous cous, only it contains quite a lot of protein. Plus it's really fun to eat. This recipe would be a great way to try quinoa for the first time. It's chock full of veggies, very healthy and tasty. If I were to make this again, I would probably kick up the spices a bit, since I tend to like flavorful food. This dish keeps with the traditional flavor of Spanish paella, which tends to be more subtle in taste.

Orange Berry Muffins
I happened to notice a copy of Dorie Greenspan's celebrated cookbook Baking: From My Home to Yours while visiting my mom the other day. Having read a lot of blog entries from Tuesdays with Dorie, I've been coveting this book for a while, and so borrowed it for the time being. It is chock full of some great recipes, many of which I can hardly wait to try out. Since I was expecting a couple house guests this weekend, I thought it would be great to make some muffins that could be munched on at any time. The orange blueberry muffins caught my eye, and so I whipped these up late Thursday. The muffins have a mild orange flavor, and are subtly sweet. I would rate these as a solidly good muffin. They don't bowl me over, and I don't find myself eating ten at a time, but they are certainly a pleasant thing to eat in the morning.

5 comments:

Teresa said...

I love chilis, chouriço and quinoa! Thanks for the recipes.

I'm very hungry now :)

isolada. by design said...

Oh, you are right! These recipes are of great interest. I've most of the ingredients on hand for the casserole and paella, including the quinoa. Yum. And I bet you could substitute farro, pearl barley and/or adzuki beans for the quinoa, too. We're really looking at cooking methods here, more so then specific ingredients, don't you think?

Off to print that I may prepare.

Thank you so much for more artsy food with serious goodness.

Hilary said...

Mmm...lucky guests! The chile relleno casserole sounds great (I mean, it all sounds great...) and seems like a very interesting take on the dish. I'd love to try the quinoa paella, too. I've had quinoa in restaurants but have never prepared it myself. Thanks for the links!

missliz said...

Too funny, I have a Chile Rellenos Casserole recipe sitting on my counter. Cold weather makes hot and spicy sound great! Thanks for sharing your recipes.

Victoria said...

Yum! Everything looks so good, and I adore quinoa!