Vegetarian Lentil Sloppy Joes

I'm way behind on my food blogging! A few weeks ago, Caitlin and I made dinner from one of her vegetarian cookbooks. This dish was called "Snobby Joes" -- "Snobby Joe thinks he's better than all the other Joes because he doesn't have any meat."

Lentils replace the meat in this dish, so we started boiling them while we chopped up one onion, one green bell pepper, and two cloves garlic.

 We sauteed the vegetables in olive oil and then added the cooked lentils, 2 teaspoons oregano, 1 teaspoon salt, and 2 tablespoons chili powder (the recipe called for 3 TBSP chili powder, but we made it a bit less spicy). We then added a can of tomato sauce, 1/4 a cup tomato paste, and cooked a little longer. We threw in a couple tablespoons maple syrup, and a tablespoon yellow mustard. We cooked it a little longer and then it was ready to be served on a bun!

I really didn't miss the meat much in this dish, but if you do, you could pretty much make the same recipe and sub meat for lentils. This makes really good leftovers too.

P.S. We also made yummy mashed potatoes, which you will see pictured here on the plate.

Don't Cook if You Can't Handle Heat! Spicy Steak, Sweet Potato Salad, & Peanut Butter cookies!

Aimee and I moved about a month ago and we couldn't have done it without help from friends Anton, Rachel, and Ben, so we planned an ambitious thank-you dinner! Aimee made the Double Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies the night before (with a little help from me)--they turned out great and we've been snacking on them for days. If anyone wants me to post the recipe, I can, but I wasn't greatly involved in their production so I'm not gonna put it here.




We made Chili-Rubbed Sirloins with Guacamole Salsa and Roasted Sweet Potato Salad with Lime and Honey from (of course) the Big Book of Backyard Cooking. As soon as I got home from work, I had to start cooking, so the first thing I did was get the potatoes ready for roasting. Right away, I ran into a minor problem--we'd accidentally bought two different varieties of sweet potatoes. 


A day earlier, we'd had trouble at the store discerning between yams and sweet potatoes, which both seemed to be in the same bin and looked pretty dang similar. When we questioned the difference a fellow shopper asked, "Aren't they the same thing?"
"They're labelled differently," I pointed out. "And have different prices."
She shrugged and we concluded that they were probably pretty similar. I didn't realize the difference until I got the skin off. "Yams" (which I guess is just a colloquial term for orange sweet potatoes?) are bright orange underneath and these are what we were SUPPOSED to buy. "Sweet potatoes," as labeled by Safeway, are white under the skin. If you look closely, you can actually tell through the skin that yams are "oranger," so I guess I learned something new.


Anyway, back to the cooking adventure: since we'd bought two of each, I decided that our salad would just be multi-colored. I chopped the potatoes into 1-inch cubes, threw them on two foil-covered baking sheets, tossed them in olive oil and kosher salt and popped them in the oven on 450 for 20 to 25 minutes (they have to be stirred around once or twice and checked to make sure they don't burn). 


I continued with the slicing and dicing. I chopped up some roma tomatoes, 4 avocadoes, two jalapenos, some red onion (our substitute for shallots) and cilantro. The tomatoes, avocados, and jalapenos went into a bowl together and the cilantro and onion were mixed with some lime juice, cumin and salt and then poured over the tomato mixture. Guacamole salsa, finished! We tasted some and it had quite a bite to it. 


By this time, Aimee had come home and mixed up the lime, honey, and cilantro together for the sweet potato dressing . We poured it on and added salt to taste. Yum. Done! Ben arrived, and we chatted with him as we finished up. It was at this point that four of my fingers started to burn from the jalapeno juice. I ignored it and kept working. 


Aimee rubbed the steaks with a mixture of cumin, chili powder, salt and pepper. Except for Anton's--he doesn't like the the heat. Well at least in his food--he handled it pretty well when a fireball from the BBQ exploded in his face later. We're still not sure what happened. This is after a discussion about how most of us are pyros. Meanwhile, the burn in my fingers intensified and I had to run my hands under cold water. I'd cut jalapenos with my bare hands before and never had this problem. These must have been some pretty intense peppers.

  


Rachel and Anton arrived. After some internet research, I decided to douse my hand in milk to try to stop the burn from the jalapenos, which I was now denouncing as seriously evil. Anton agreed and felt validated for his dislike of spicy food.


We gave Anton the grilling job and he got the BBQ going with only the minor mishap mentioned before. And some smoke that made the upstairs neighbor come down to make sure that our apartment wasn't on fire. But seriously, we appreciate Anton for getting the grill going! I can't even get it sufficiently lit on my own, even with copious amounts of lighter fluid.

After more internet research, I smothered my burning hand in dish soap and let it sit for a while, which seemed to put the lid on the jalapeno fire. We grilled the steaks to about medium well and served them with the salsa on top. We had a great time eating, drinking wine, and playing games until about 1am. 

The only major problems were Anton's singed eyebrows and my jalapeno burns, which reoccured after cleaning up and kept me awake until 3:30am! EVIL PEPPER. Yummy steak and sweet potatoes. 

Turkey Burgers with White Cheddar and Apple Slices

Janelle and I decided to save money by making dinner instead of going out to eat. She thought turkey burgers sounded good, which was exciting because I knew there was a great recipe (that I had made before) in the The Big Book of Backyard Cooking. The fancy version that the book suggests involves an actual grill, grated apple and diced onion in the meat, chilling the burgers for an hour before grilling, and putting watercress on finished product. But the simple version was delicious enough for me!

Mix about a pound of ground turkey with 1/2 a teaspoon of salt, 1/2 a teaspoon of pepper, and 2 tablespoons honey mustard. Cook until done using your favorite method of cooking meat (we used a George Foreman). Toast your hamburger buns and assemble burgers, garnishing with honey mustard, apple slices, and sharp white cheddar cheese (there's a great Irish cheddar at Trader Joe's that works well for this). We also added avocado because everything tastes better with avocado.

We also wanted sweet potato fries, but they didn't have any frozen ones at the grocery store, so we just bought a sweet potato. These were super easy to make. Peel the potato and slice it up--slice it thinner if you want crispier fries. Put on a baking sheet, sprinkle with salt and pepper and drizzle with olive oil. Bake for fifteen minutes on 450 degrees.

This first blog wasn't terribly exciting because I already knew how to make these (read: nothing went wrong), but stay tuned for more exciting adventures with newer recipes!