I used this recipe from the blog Eating from the Ground Up.  I subbed in polenta where Alana used millet, but otherwise left the recipe untouched.  The only hiccup I ran into was getting the dough rolled out thinly enough, but my rolling pin skills could use some work.  (My pie crust required some serious patching).  I had recently acquired a pasty wheel as my latest absolutely must-have kitchen purchase, so I was able to cut out rectangles with pretty scalloped edges.

I covered the crackers with a simple goat cheese and chive spread, and they were delicious.  The “I made it myself!” feeling of satisfaction is one of the best seasonings I’ve ever come across. 

Cracker Recipe

Goat Cheese and Chive Spread

• 1/4 cup goat cheese
• 1 tablespoon milk
• 1 tablespoon chopped chives (or herb of choice)

Mix the goat cheese, milk, and chives together in a small bowl until smooth.  Add a little more milk to make the goat cheese easier to spread if necessary.

What’s one of your most successful kitchen projects? 

These leftover grilled vegetables can be re-invented in so many ways.  Tonight I had them over polenta (cooked in roasted vegetable stock) with goat cheese. 

I love the combination of goat cheese and roasted vegetables, and the goat cheese melting into the polenta is extra delicious.  Bell peppers still aren’t my favorite (though I want to love them for all the pretty colors they come in), but they go so well with the zucchini, onion, and yellow squash.

Other reinventions of these vegetables will include a pasta salad, in an omelet, and probably in a wrap with hummus for lunch at least once this week.

How do you reinvent leftovers?

Grandma was a smart cookie.  I got such joy out of telling Grandma stories.  “My ninety year old Grandma has gmail, and she gchats and reads my blog!” was a sentence I often uttered.  I’ve met many wonderful people thanks to this blog, but I’m extra grateful for how the blog brought me closer to my grandmother.  She read it religiously and would email me with garden advice or recipes.  Email was an easy medium for us to communicate by (completely unhindered by hearing aid issues), and the blog let her keep up with my adventures 3000 miles away. 

Mostly I associate Grandma with her garden and with food.  She was always feeding us.  I can hear my own mother saying “Really, Mom, we just need cereal,” while my grandparents calmly ignored her and filled the table full of scrambled eggs, bacon, incredible hash browns, doughnuts, plus toast with butter and “Grandma” jam (as we called the jam she made from her garden raspberries).  There was always cereal on the table too, but really how could you eat cereal when presented with the most delicious breakfast potatoes ever?  Thinking back, I suspect the secret to those potatoes was a combination of butter and bacon grease.  And love, of course.  When Grandma moved in with my aunt and uncle, I was gifted one of the magical cast iron skillets that had given rise to years of delicious breakfasts.

(I make some pretty mean potatoes, myself)

Really though, Grandma was known for her pies.  Ribbons adorned the wall in her front room from competitions her pies had won.  (At least that’s what she always told me.)  In the third grade I started a spelling sentence war with my teacher when I used the spelling word “best” to assert that “My grandmother makes the best apple pie in the whole world.”  My teacher responded in red ink that her mother made the best apple pie.  I accepted this challenge and proceeded to find a way to work my grandmother’s pie making prowess into every possible homework assignment that year.  Grandma’s apple pie was my favorite, though she made all kinds of pie.  When we came to visit, she’d always have apple pie, special for me she’d say, and even when we got in late at night, I somehow always finagled a piece before bed. 

The problem with being 3000 miles away, though, is that you can’t quickly turn on a dime and get to the other side of the country.  (I’d like to volunteer for any teleporting beta-testing anyone may know about).  My mom and sister warned me that if I bought the last minute flight, Grandma would definitely come back to haunt me for spending that much money on a plane ticket.  So stuck on the wrong side of the country, I decided to bake an apple pie for Grandma.  I figured I’d bake it in her cast iron skillet and it would be the best culinary tribute I could offer.  I’d already taken this skillet well outside its usual realm of bacon and potatoes with buttermilk skillet cake, so I thought it should handle a Grandma apple pie just fine.

Safely armed with a mission, I headed to the grocery store for apples and butter.  I got briefly distracted by some rhubarb, but that’s a project for another day.  Once home I cut the butter into flour using two butter knives, formed it into two small balls, wrapped them in saran wrap and popped them in the fridge for an hour.  I peeled and sliced up the apples and sprinkled them with a small mountain of sugar and a few dashes of cinnamon.  After the hour I bravely pulled out one ball of dough and set to rolling it out.  This part is always nerve-wracking for me, but I knew if the dough tore that Grandma would have just patched it right up with her fingers.  So that’s exactly what I did.

As pies go it wasn’t particularly pretty, and it was far from perfect.  But it was exactly right anyhow.

The Quarry Lakes Regional Park was absolutely beautiful.  The scenery was amazing, with miles and miles of trails, rolling hills, and people swimming in the quarry.  I’ll be heading back for some more miles, either by foot or bike, and a picnic sometime soon.  The Mermaid races are always impeccably organized.  We pulled into easy parking right by the start/finish lines and grabbed our numbers and t-shirts with no issue.

(thanks to Andrea for the gorgeous picture!)

Full blown nerves had kicked in on the ride down, and as I pinned on my number I realized that I was already in my shorts and tank top and I was plenty warm.  It was going to be a hot day.

I lined up at the start line, several rows back.  There were only 184 entrants in the half marathon, so we weren’t crowded at all.  (The race also had an 18 miler, a 10k and a 5k that started at different times).  We lined up, counted down, and took off.

My goal for the first mile was just to keep the pace even, and slower than a 9 minute mile.  This was my fifth half marathon.  The last three, I’ve felt so great at the starting line that I went out too fast and blew up hard by mile 9.  I was determined to avoid that this weekend.  I ran a 9:05 in the first mile, which was still faster than I had planned, but felt much slower than my legs wanted to go.  As I clicked off splits in the early miles, I kept saying to myself “just stay in the game.”  Being smart early would make a good race possible in the later miles. 

My PR in the half marathon was 2:04:17, run in my second half marathon in Hyannis in 2010.  The two half marathons I’ve run since I moved to California I ran in 2:19 and 2:20.  I knew I was better trained for this race than a 2:19, but wasn’t sure a PR was in the cards.

The early miles clicked off with mile 2 in 9:03, mile 3 in 9:15, and mile 4 in 9:07.  I kept my Garmin just on the lap pace instead of on the total distance and average pace for the race.  That way I could only focus on the mile I was in.  I have a tendency to look at the total time and focus on a goal slipping away from me.  This way all I could do was control the mile I was running.  I took my first gu at a water stop at mile 5.  Split in 9:13. 

At this point, I was determined to get to the halfway point and then see what my legs could do.  Mile 6 in 9:17, mile 7 in 8:55 and mile 8 in 8:57.  My legs were feeling great, but there was still a lot of race left to run, so I tried to stay conservative and reminded myself to “stay in the game.” There wasn’t a lot of shade on the trail, and at this point I was searching for the mile 9 marker.  I never actually saw the mile 9 marker, which threw me into a bit of a panic that my Garmin might have been wrong.  The course was mostly flat but had a lot of short steep down and ups to go under the bridges where I might have lost satellites.  Mile 9 in 9:19.

I finally saw the mile 10 marker (my watch was running about 0.2 long at this point) and started desperately looking for the next water stop.  Mile 10 in 9:28. I was starting to overheat.  I don’t regret not carrying water, as I never run with it, but I really wished for water at this point in the race.  I finally saw a water stop around 10.5 miles, and I took a second gu.  Looking back, I don’t think I needed the second gu, but my legs were getting tired, and I hoped it would give me a little boost.  I walked through this water stop.  Mile 11 in 10:13.  The mile 12 marker was on the other side of one of the bridges, and I could see it from about half a mile away.  I tried to pick up the pace, knowing I had less than 2 miles still to run.  Mile 12 in 10:07.

I grabbed a cup of water at the mile 12 water stop and tried to further pick up the pace towards the finish line.  My friend who ran the 10k had already finished and back tracked down the half marathon course and met me with about 0.6 miles to go.  I was so glad to see her, and she helped me pick my pace back up to the finish line.  Mile 13 in 9:16.  You could see the finish line with still more than a quarter mile to go and had to actually run away from the finish line before you could loop back around and finish.  That was mentally tough, but I picked it up and sprinted to the finish.  Last 0.3 miles at an 8:06 pace.  

I crossed the finish line in 2:03:36: a new PR, and good enough for fourth in my age group.  I was really so happy with this race.  While I’d secretly hoped that today would be a sub-2 half marathon, I know I ran a good, smart race.  I felt strong through nearly everything, and at no point did I feel like walking or quitting.  I know my legs have that sub 2 in them somewhere, but on a day when it was 83 degrees when I crossed the finish line, I’m beyond pleased with a new PR.

I cannot say enough about how much I enjoy the Mermaid races.  This was my second race with this organization; I ran the San Francisco 5k with them last November.  At the finish line of this race they gave us adorable silver necklaces that said “inspire” on them instead of medals.  Our race bibs were personalized with our names on them, and the volunteers all along the course and at the water stops cheered for us by name.  The announcer is hilarious, chatting with people at the start line, calling names at the finish, and cheerfully handing out awards at the end.  The whole race atmosphere is so welcoming.  The half marathon had several out and back sections, and the woman who won the whole race said “good job!” to all of us each time she passed us on an out and back section.  Everything about the races is well thought out, the location was beautiful, with plentiful parking and bathrooms.  The start times were well staggered so I never felt crowded despite how many people were there for all four events. 

The race even had a photo booth set up that allowed you to get your photo taken and then immediately post it to facebook or twitter.  I didn’t try this option out, as I was nervous before the race and then exhausted after, but I thought it was just another great touch.  The half marathon was $65 which is totally comparable to other local events that I’ve run.

I’ll definitely be at the Mermaid San Francisco run again this fall, but I’ll be seeing them a little sooner than that.  All that cross training I’ve been doing?  It’s in preparation for the Mermaid Triathlon in Alameda next month.  I’m completely petrified about swimming in the Bay, but I know that if I come out of the water in one piece the rest should just be fun.  I’ve never done a triathlon, and two months ago I couldn’t swim 50 consecutive yards.  I’ve registered for the “friends and family” division which takes off first, so hopefully I won’t have to worry about another race fear which is being the last one out of the water.  Open water swimming has always freaked me out a little, so I’m kind of looking forward to facing this fear.

If I survive my triathlon, I think the rest of the year will see me searching out another half marathon to try and track down that elusive sub-2 finish.  I’d like to get it done before the Nike Women’s half marathon in October, which I want to run just for fun.

Any triathlon advice for me?  Or do you know a great PR half marathon course I could run between the end of June through August?

Before J became vegetarian, buffalo chicken tenders were one of his favorite things.  Without fail, if they were on a menu, we’d be ordering them.  I had nearly no spice tolerance, and sometimes the dish would arrive at the table, and I swore I would tear up just smelling it.  I never understood why you’d want to eat something called “satanically spicy,” that literally brought you to tears.  Somewhere along the way an occasional preference for spice rubbed off on me.  Now I find myself occasionally craving buffalo roasted Brussels sprouts and baked tofu doused in buffalo sauce.  So a simple sandwich with buffalo tofu sounded like a perfect idea.

Start with a slice of toasted whole wheat bread.

Spread with goat cheese (I mix a tiny bit of milk into mine to make it easier to spread).

Top with buffalo tofu (extra firm tofu sliced, covered with buffalo sauce, and baked at 400 degrees for 15 minutes each side).

And top again with roasted asparagus.

I’d be lying if I pretended I ate this open faced.  After one attempt at eating the open-faced sandwich with a fork, I quickly toasted another slice of bread, slathered on some more goat cheese, and squished the whole thing together.  The goat cheese was a nice complement to the buffalo spiciness, but I’ll bet a really thick blue cheese dressing would be delicious, too.

The bread and the goat cheese compensates a little for some of the spice, so this should be a tear-free sandwich.

Chia seeds have been touted as a superfood by a variety of sources.  I make no health claims about why you should or shouldn’t be eating them.  Rather, I love the chia seeds in this recipe because of their ability to create a thick pudding-like texture without any cooking.  This past week I’ve been mixing up this chocolate coconut chia pudding when I get home from work and popping it in the fridge.  Come the post-dinner chocolate craving, and I have an answer already waiting for me.  Chocolate and coconut is one of my favorite combinations, and topped with some shredded coconut and a strawberry or two, the pudding is pretty as well as chocolate-y.  A pretty dessert fills an entirely different need than a handful of chocolate chips. (though sometimes the chocolate chips are just the thing)

Chocolate Coconut Chia Pudding (inspired by a chia pudding recipe in the May/June 2012 issue of VegNews)

A simple dessert for one.  You could make this with chocolate almond or soy milk and remove the cocoa, or make it with coconut milk for an extra hit of coconut flavor.  This dessert is both vegan and gluten-free.

• 1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk
• 1 tablespoon cocoa
• 2 tablespoons chia seeds
• 1 teaspoon coconut extract
• 1 teaspoon agave nectar
• shredded sweetened coconut for garnish
• strawberries for garnish

1. In a small bowl (the bowl you plan to eat the pudding out of), mix together the almond milk and cocoa until you’ve made chocolate almond milk.
2. Add the chia seeds and coconut extra and stir so the chia seeds are well mixed in.
3. Add the agave nectar and stir to mix it in.  If you use a sweetened almond milk, you may not need the agave nectar.  Taste after stirring and adjust the level of sweetness to your preference.
4. Place the bowl in the fridge for at least an hour prior to serving.  The pudding will firm up more with longer times in the fridge.
5. When ready to serve, garnish with shredded coconut and strawberries and serve.

I’m excited about the possible variations on this dessert.  Blending strawberries and almond milk in a blender before adding the chia seeds should give a lovely pink dessert.  I also have plans for a banana version topped with a peanut butter sauce.  With hands on time of just 5 minutes you really can’t go wrong!

While you mostly see food shots on this blog, I really love taking photos of strong athletes when they’re in the zone, and the boot camp ladies were fantastic subjects.  They were able to completely ignore the giant camera in their faces and focus in totally on what they were doing.  Trust me, no one was mugging for the camera while doing hill sprints!

I’ve chosen not to include some of my favorite shots here.  I imagine you’ll be seeing some of these shots on the UrbanKick website and facebook page soon.  While everyone was happy to be photographed, I didn’t think to ask permission from anyone to put their faces here on my blog.  Still, I think you can see the strength and the story in some of these photos even without seeing the smiles or determination on their faces.

There’s something about this last shot that I just love.  It’s not a classically perfect shot; the focus is very soft and a little blurred.  Yet I love the softness of the photo, knowing these ladies were sprinting up a hill in the middle of a very urban Oakland.  There’s a serenity to the moment despite their surroundings and how hard they were working.

Thanks to Shane and all the ladies for letting me come and take pictures.  I had such a good time.  Next time though, I promise I’ll be carrying one of those kettle bells instead of my camera.

When I do eat and make salads, I like them to have some substance, something special, basically, some oomph.  Please don’t just give me greens and some oil and vinegar. I completely sympathized with the ladies at spoon fork bacon when they said that this is a salad for salad haters.

Tomatoes and cucumbers just scream for summer, and of course mozzarella classically pairs perfectly with tomato.  I have to resist the urge not to dip these tiny mozzarella balls in truffle salt and eat them all on their own.  If possible, they’re even better in this salad than they are on their own, just coated in truffle salt.  Summer isn’t here yet, despite my attempts to hurry it along, but we’re just on the cusp of tomato season in California.  Plus this recipe had burrowed its way into my head, so I found myself standing in front of the tomatoes in the produce section, completely oblivious to whatever was actually on my grocery list.

The recipe is pretty simple, but I made one delicious change.  I roasted a head of garlic (see how to roast garlic), and mixed the roasted garlic with the olive oil and herbs and drizzled the whole thing over my cubed sourdough baguette before roasting it for croutons.  It was difficult to resist the urge to slather the roasted garlic on the sourdough baguette and forget the salad entirely.  However, in the interest of many lunches to come, I did resist, and at lunch today, I was so glad I had.

This salad will be a thousand times better in a few months, when I can pull cherry tomatoes off our own tomato plants, and grab a cucumber for the garden.  But in the meantime I’m happy to celebrate summer just a little bit early.

Months ago now, J and I were eating at Canary Square, a restaurant in Jamaica Plain.  We’d split an order of fries to start, and our waiter offered to bring us a second dip in addition to the house-made ketchup.  A side of garlic aioli came out with the fries.  As I dipped in my first fry, I had to summon massive amounts of willpower not to go at the little container of aioli with my spoon and then my tongue.  Silky smooth and garlicky, the aioli was a nice contrast to the crispy fry.  I could lavish on many more adjectives, but truly, I was dipping a potato fried in fat into garlic-flavored fat.  It was bound to be delicious.

Determined to recreate the experience, I came home and attempted my own aioli, carefully following this recipe for garlic lemon aioli from Food52. I’d read about making mayonnaise before, and preparing to make my own aioli left me a little anxious and with visions of Julia Child carefully heating copper bowls to a precise temperature before whisking away.  I decided that if the emulsion broke I’d just turn to trusty Google for a solution.  Plus, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d know what a broken emulsion would even look like.  I’ll save you the anticipation; the recipe worked perfectly.  I love recipes like that.  Also, the aioli was delicious, full of garlic, lemon, and pride that I hadn’t mucked it up.  I happily licked the whisk (which I would have done even if I’d had an audience other than my cat, it was that good). 

In some basic attempt at health, I’d roasted some asparagus to make “asparagus fries” for dipping in the aioli.  I calmly consumed a pound of asparagus in this fashion.  Now aioli is basically an egg yolk, flavorings of your choice, and massive amounts of oil.  Despite it’s deliciousness, this isn’t something I safely can recommend as a daily snack.

Which leads us to this salad. 

It’s not as delicious as garlic aioli.  Sorry about that, but I’m not going to pretend otherwise.  However, it has many of the same flavors, and you could eat it every day for lunch without feeling your arteries harden with each bite.  Roasted asparagus and roasted potatoes (I’d like to pretend the potatoes are a nod to the french fries in the original experience, but really I just add potatoes to everything) and a hard boiled egg top a bed of lettuce or spinach.  The dressing is just a minced garlic clove, a tiny bit of grainy mustard, juice from half a lemon, olive oil, and salt. 

I roasted a pound of asparagus and a whole skillet full of potatoes, hard boiled half a dozen eggs, and promptly had lunch for the week.  This was a salad I happily ate 5 days in a row, with only the occasional wistful imagining that I was actually licking garlic aioli off a whisk in my kitchen.

So this weekend was a beautiful surprise.  Temperatures were in the 70s (which is a difference you notice when your body temperature has become perfectly calibrated to 67 degrees).  The sun burned through the clouds and the fog by 9AM.  Our backyard (which appears to be a microclimate that is always the hottest place in all of Berkeley) was toasty and beautiful.  My neighbor and I even summoned the wrath of the weather gods and went out to buy lounge chairs on Saturday afternoon.  We were convinced that doomed us to a cool and cloudy Sunday, but when the next morning rolled around it was sunny and even warmer than the day before.

(the perfect spot to spend a weekend afternoon)

Something else you don’t expect when you move from Boston?  The public pools in California?  They’re all outdoors.  Outdoors!  I was so confused the first time I took myself to the pool to go swimming.  The pool I went to in Boston was in the basement of a middle school.  You had to navigate a hallway of red lockers pulled onward by the overpowering stench of chlorine to swim.  While I’ve found myself missing the middle school basement on dark mornings at 5:30AM when it’s raining outside, generally the outdoor pool phenomenon is a home run.  Especially during a warm and sunny weekend. 

On the way back from the pool I’d practically convinced myself it was summer.  As I ran through a litany of possible lunch options, I quickly discarded them all.  Nothing seemed appropriate for this temporarily unseasonal day.  I’d nearly convinced myself that a PB&J and a glass of milk would solve my nostalgic need to celebrate summer in April.  Then I remembered that I had planned to make Jenna’s Kale Salad with Oranges, Almonds and Avocado later in the week.  Clearly this was a summery salad!

I needed ingredients though, so I headed to the grocery store.  I’m sure my residual chlorine perfume helped me cut through the crowds.  While in Berkeley Bowl, I saw some flake coconut and had a brilliant idea.  I’d been meaning to make Heidi’s Kale Salad with Toasted Coconut.  So I decided to mash together the two recipes, and this citrusy coconut mash up of a salad was born.

Kale Coconut Salad

This recipe makes one large salad, perfect for enjoying in a lounge chair on a summer day.

• 1 medium orange (how to supreme an orange), and reserved juice
• 2 tablespoons unsweetened flake coconut
• 5 large Tuscan kale leaves
• 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
• juice of 1/2 a lemon
• salt and pepper (just a pinch of each)
• 2 tablespoons maple cinnamon almonds (you can make your own using Ashley’s recipe)

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
2. While the oven is heating, supreme the orange over the bowl you intend to eat the salad in.  Catch all the juice in the bowl, and when you are doing cutting up the orange, squeeze the remaining pulp and membrane to get all the juice out.  Set the orange segments aside.
3. Spread the coconut on a baking sheet and toast at 400 degrees for about 5 minutes.  Watch this closely as the coconut will burn very quickly.
4. Remove the stems from the kale leaves and roughly chop them.
5. To the bowl containing the orange juice add the olive oil, lemon juice and salt and pepper.  Whisk the salad dressing together.
6. Add the kale to the salad dressing and massage the dressing into the kale.  Let sit for at least 5 minutes.
7. Garnish with orange segments, toasted coconut, and maple cinnamon almonds.