Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Bites

dramatization

It's that time of year again. The time of year when the ice has thawed, the flowers have bloomed, and the sun does its absolute best to kill us and burn our corpses in to crispy bits. I enjoy the fun added benefit of having what early settlers to this country referred to as "no stupid air conditioning in my stupid apartment," so I get the full brunt of this. The point is, at times like this it's important to find small bits of comfort and relief from the oppressive heat to try and distract us from the grim reality of our impending doom. Being weirdly kind of healthy is just a fringe benefit.

Ingredients:

1 cup Greek Yogurt
2 TBSP Peanut Butter (I used a natural, no sugar added kind of peanut butter because it just tastes like peanuts, which lets me control the final flavor better. But use what you like)
1.5 tsp Honey
1 tsp Vanilla Extract

So, as those of you who haven't been blinded by the sun may have noticed, there's not a whole lot going on in terms of ingredients here. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this is a recipe designed to give relief from the heat. Spending hours dealing with a vast array of ingredients in a hot sticky kitchen isn't conducive to that. Secondly, this is a basic version. Delicious, but you can totally add optional extras, like some chocolate syrup, hazelnut spread, candied almonds, dulce de leche, or nutmeg. Definitely not all of them together. Probably. The point is, make these. Enjoy them. But don't be afraid to add in a little something extra once you've got the hang of it. That said, the first thing you're going to need to do is take all of your ingredients, splorp them in to a bowl, and mix them together. Seriously, that's like 95% of the work. Again. Heat. The less time I spend not lying on my bed underneath a ceiling fan, the better.

Don't let the cool shape distract you from the deliciousness

Now it's time to contemplate containment vessels. The idea is to get bite-sized bits of frozen refreshing goodness. I happen to have just come back from a trip with some cool silicone molds. If you didn't, you can make weird shapeless blobs by throwing some wax paper on a baking sheet and spooning your yogurt mixture on to it. Or, you could just use an ice-cube tray and make life easy on yourself. In any case, throw those suckers in to your freezer for at least 45 minutes, though an hour and a half would be better. Whenever the heat gets to you (so, you know, all the time), grab one, pop it in your face hole, and forget about life for a while. Enjoy, and if you survive I'll see y'all next week!

Eggplant Parmesan

This is an unrelated picture of an
awesome cave I visited last week. Enjoy.

There's a strange pleasure in taking something that's inherently healthy and making it, at the same time, both delicious and decidedly unhealthy. And sure, eggplants aren't that healthy, modern health fads aside. They've got a fair number of nutrients and whatnot in them, but not in any significant amounts. Also, left to their own devices they have the texture and flavor of styrofoam, which isn't commonly associated with either health or deliciousness. But eggplant parmesan is tasty and unhealthy enough to totally bridge those gaps.

Ingredients:

2 Standard Issue Eggplants
4 Standard Issue Eggs
1 lb shredded Mozzarella Cheese
1.5 cups Grated Parmesan Cheese
3 Cups Seasoned Breadcrumbs
2 Cups Flour
2 tsp Smoked Paprika
1 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Tomato Sauce (you can use whatever good reasonably hearty tomato sauce you like. I happen to have a pretty awesome recipe right here, but then again I'm more prepared than you.)

The first thing you're gonna need to do is deal with the fact that eggplants are super weird. I actually wasn't kidding before about them pretty much being made up of styrofoam. When you cut it, it's going to squeak like you're cutting through the industrial-strength packing supplies that are still holding your new TV hostage inside of its box. Don't get discouraged by how obviously unappetizing your eggplant is. That's to be expected. That's what we're here to fix. So chop the ends off of your eggplant, and then slice it lengthwise. Exact size doesn't matter, but shoot for each slice to be between 1/8 and 1/4 of an inch thick. Now it's time to get prepped. Find or steal 3 large bowls. Take one and fill it up with your flour, salt, pepper, and paprika, and mix them all together. Take another and fill it with your eggs, which you've taken the time to beat lightly in to submission. Fill your third bowl up with your breadcrumbs, and get ready to get gunk on your hands. Working on small batches, toss your eggplant slices in your flour mix, then in to your eggs, and finally in your breadcrumbs, before laying your finished slices on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Throw those suckers in to a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes, or until the eggplant gets tender and the breadcrumbs turn golden and look delicious.

Now with zero recognizable eggplant bits!

Now it's time to build something great.  Line a baking dish with a layer of your eggplant slices. (You may have noticed that this recipe requires a lot of extras. Bowls, baking sheets, baking dishes, etc. You may accuse me of having betrayed my principles and having made recipes for the borgeouise. Aside from the fact that you can buy versions of everything required for like $2, I'm a fairly certain that I never claimed to have any principles, so shut it) Slather your layer of eggplant with tomato sauce, and sprinkle on some mozzarella. Repeat until you're out of eggplant. Take your parmesan and gently pour it all over the top of that mess, like a caring mother bird, tenderly pouring parmesan cheese on its young. Unlike all but the most callous of mother birds, however, now you're gonna throw that in to a 375 degree oven for about 35 more minutes, or until the top gets bubbly and brown and you pretty much can't stand the thought of waiting any longer to eat it. Wait to eat it until it cools down. Unless you're a fan of mouth, hand, and face burns. Either way, it's no skin off my nose (because I waited until my food cooled down to eat it). Now guzzle it down and lie to yourself about how healthy you're being by eating eggplant. Enjoy!

Kalamata salad

Life can be hard. It can just sort of wear you down until you feel trapped in an endless routine, demoralized and dissatisfied. I'm speaking about other people's lives, obviously, because I'm somehow on like my 4th vacation so far this year. And it's only May. It's been kind of a whirlwind of a year, and I'm still not entirely sure how/if I managed to afford it all. But here I am, sitting on a Mediterranean beach, playing guitar, and actively waiting for the other shoe to drop. Eventually this will all come to an end, reality will butt its stupid face into my business, and I'll end up cleaning chimneys or something to retroactively finance my life of raging excess and occasional Airbnb use. All I'll have left will be the memories, the recipes inspired by my travels, and probably cirrhosis of the liver. Good times.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Baby Spinach (the adult spinach leaf has a darker color and a rougher texture, making the infant Spinach the easier prey)
2 Tomatoes
1 smallish Red Onion
1.5 cups pitted Kalamata Olives
2 cloves Garlic
1/3 cup Lemon Juice
1/3 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1.5 tsp Dijon Mustard
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Black Pepper

The first thing you're going to have to do is come to terms with the fact that you're going to eat a salad. Sure, salad is essentially a pile of leaves and other detritus that was probably first eaten as some sort of prank, but it's also allegedly healthy. Eating it, instead of real food, can help you live a longer, healthier life. A long life...full of salad. Yay? Once you've come to terms with this grim reality, we can work on making our salad not suck. Peel your onion and then cut it into quarters. Then thinly sliced those quarters and disdainfully toss them into a bowl. Remove the white core from your tomatoes, then chop them (the tomatoes) in to chunks and add them in to your bowl of disdain. Make sure your Spinach is dry, then throw it in there too, along with your olives. You're pretty much done at this point. Say what you will about salad, but it's super easy to make.

Actual salad for humans

It's time to talk about dressing. Many people who want to eat more salad despite the fact that it's salad will try and disguise it with a ton of sugar and fat. While this is tasty, it kind of ruins the entire point of eating salad in the first place (health concerns and/or masochism), at which point you may as well just eat a burger or some ice cream, because it's got the same nutritional value and will taste much better. So we're going to get our deliciousness from less contradictory sources. Torture lemons until you've got your 1/3 cup of juice. Then combine it with your oil, mustard, salt, pepper, and a tsp of the juice your olives were sitting in. Then choppity chop your garlic into tiny bits and add it in to the party. If you let this dressing sit in the fridge for a day or two it'll get even better, but you can totally use it right away. Just mix the whole thing together, toss it on your salad as needed, and consume. Congratulations! You successfully outwitted nature, and ate something both healthy and tasty. Stupid nature.