New Recipes: Summer, Part I

Signing on to finish up this post, I noticed the page view count at the bottom has crept above the 10,000 mark! In November this blog will be five years old, and it means a lot that so many people have stumbled across it since it began in Japan almost a half decade ago. Thank you!

I find the 10,000 page views even more remarkable in light of my rather sporadic posts of the past few years. I am still looking for (always will be?) a schedule I can stick to, but in the meantime there have been so many new recipes tried in my kitchen that I've had to break them up into two separate posts.

At the beginning of the summer, I rediscovered the joys of being a public library card holder, and all but two of the recipes here came from a visit back in May.

I checked out a copy of "Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook" by Joe Yonan. I appreciated his cooking philosophy and the other essays included among the recipes, and liked the recipe for Enfrijoladas (top right photo) so much I made it three times in short succession. It's just as good for breakfast as it is for lunch and dinner. I also tried Black Pepper Tofu (bottom right), Indian Chickpea Salad (top left) and the recipe for Broccoli Couscous Salad (not pictured). The couscous salad included pickled raisins as a topping, which ended up being much more delicious than I was expecting. They're kind of sweet and sour, and go great with all sorts of salads.

That same trip to the library, I sat down with a copy of June's Real Simple magazine and found a recipe for Green Curry. It was simple to make, and had a ton of flavor. Having tried green curry paste, it wasn't much of a stretch to try red curry paste in this Slow Cooker Thai Chicken Soup recipe. My mom, who came to help me out for a week after I dislocated my kneecap, prepared everything while I was at work, and we both enjoyed the results. The soup kept well in the fridge, and I still enjoyed it several servings later.

On the baking front, I tried my hand at homemade brownies for the second or third time ever. While brownies aren't hard to make from scratch, I grew up on the boxed mixes and haven't been able to get my homemade versions anywhere near as moist and gooey. This attempt was also turned out a bit drier than I like my brownies, but it did give me a chance to try chia seeds. The recipe, from an old Better Homes & Gardens seasonal publication, replaced a 1/2 cup of butter with 1 Tbsp of chia seeds that had been soaked overnight in a 1/2 cup of water (bottom left). Previously, my only other experiment with chia seeds was putting them in a smoothie and I definitely liked them better in a baked good. I don't think any of my co-workers noticed the lack of butter in the brownies either, as the pan I took in left quite empty.

More new summer recipes coming soon!