Black bean and sweet potato tacos

It is amazing to me just how versatile the sweet potato is. I would never have pegged it for being a good taco-filling, or even for going well with black beans. But it is, and it does. Once again I will beg your forgiveness for the lack of a photo. While my taco turned out very deliciously, it wasn't really attractive enough for my to take a picture. (I used too big of a tortilla, and put in too much filling and ate it like a burrito, except with the filling falling out all over the place). Instead, I will have to refer you to this blog instead, and to her picture, because hers is excellent.

Zucchini Pizza

Normally I'm a pepperoni pizza person. Just plain old pepperoni (or occasionally Hawaiian), but this zucchini pizza is fantastic! One of my old roommates used to make it occasionally and it made the apartment smell so good. So today I tried it. And I tried a new crust recipe, which at least so far has passed muster. Admittedly, I didn't use goat's cheese, but that was more because it was too expensive to actually buy. But next time, I think I'll spend the extra money.

Gingerbread houses

Ok, so I didn't really make a gingerbread house today, or even last week. But I did "make" some when I was home over Christmas, and now I'm posting about it.

My mom thought it would be a fun thing for my youngest brother and I do, to build this gingerbread village kit that she got somewhere. It was fun, but also incredibly difficult. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard, I mean it shouldn't be any hard than building with graham crackers, which we've all done before, but it was incredibly difficult. And so by the time we'd gotten them built we'd lost a lot of energy for decorating them. In fact, I bet you can't even tell which ones I decorated and which ones my nine year-old brother decorated.

 I'll give you a hint, I did the ones with white frosting.

So after we had decorated these, my brother came home from school, a couple days later, with a much cooler gingerbread house. (And it was a lot tastier too.)

Brigadeiros

I mentioned in my last post that I was preparing for a new adventure while using up all my food. I guess I'll tell you a little about my new adventure before I talk about how I finished up my canned goods. I am once again packing up all my junk (which never fails to amaze me at how much of it there is) and moving. (no surprise there, huh?--when am I not about to move?) And since moving within the same city or the same state gets boring after a while (though I'm not actually bored of Maryland, I love it here) I've opted for a new state. Massachusetts here I come!

Now, on to canned goods. So what are Brigadeiros you ask? They are a phenomenally delicious Brazilian treat that I learned to make while living in England two summers ago.  Basically they are sweetened condensed milk and chocolate powder. You boil them together until it's thick enough to more or less hold its shape and then you make little balls. (I let it cool enough so it didn't burn my hands and that helped it to thicken even more.) You can roll the balls in something if you like, but you don't have to. I rolled some in cocoa powder and some in plain sugar just because I could. Or if you feel like rolling things into balls is too much work you don't have to cook the milk as long and it makes a pretty awesome sauce on things like ice cream (which is how I had it the first time). 

Potato Pot Pie

We're all agreed that chicken pot pie is pretty delicious, right?  I mean, flaky crust, chicken, peas and carrots, what's not to like? I'd have to say the thing I don't like about chicken pot pie is the purchasing of the chicken. Why does meat have to be so expensive anyways?

In preparation for a new adventure (more on that later), I've been trying to use up all my food. Always a challenge. So I found myself with a whole bag of peas, and a couple carrots, but no chicken. However, I did have a potato.  (I discovered a while back that potato does make a tolerable chicken-substitute in Indian food, which is how I came to the following conclusion.) Potato pot pie anyone?

I had decided that I wanted to make this pot pie before I went home to visit my family for Christmas, and since I knew my potato would suffer during my two-week absence I decided I'd be all prepared and chop it and the carrots up before I left and freeze them. You can buy frozen vegetables so I assumed this would work. I came home and pulled my frozen veggies out of the freezer to find that my potatoes had turned black. Thinking about it, I know that potatoes turn brown after you cut them much like apples do, so I figured there was nothing wrong with blackened potatoes. So I still used them. (but I also got another fresh potato and used that too.)

What I've since learned is that potatoes don't freeze. When they thawed they were kind of mushy, which was weird, and when they were cooked in the pie they didn't taste like potatoes. Basically, they didn't look like potatoes and didn't taste like potatoes, so what I really ended up with was a pea-pot pie. (I also used far too many peas to be proportionate--why not use the whole bag up at once?) The fresh potatoes did taste like potatoes and were really quite delicious. So I do think that potatoes can work in pot pies. Just not frozen ones. And really, after you pick out the blackened bits the whole pie still turned out ok--though I still wish I didn't have to eat it all week.