Honey Mustard Parsnips and Carrots

A rare image of wild parsnips running amok

Parsnips are interesting things. If you're not aware, they're the albino-carrot looking things that you walk past without buying at the grocery store. Which seems crazy, because parsnips have a kind of nutty, peppery flavor that's completely delicious. The thing is though, it makes sense that you'd overlook them. They're kind of like the root vegetable equivalent of chameleons. Or maybe ninjas. They just seem to blend in perfectly with whatever you cook them with. Also, they may have played a role in assassinating several feudal lords of ancient Japan. And sure, that last thing I said probably isn't true, but we don't know for sure. Uncertainty is a powerful tool, for man and root vegetable alike. Anyhow, the point is that parsnips aren't carrots. Despite this, they do taste good with carrots. Which just goes to prove the old adage: if two things look similar, you should probably put them together and eat them.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Carrots

1 lb. Parsnips

1 TBSP Honey

2 TBSP Dijon Mustard

3 TBSP Olive Oil

Salt 

Black Pepper

The first thing you're going to need to do is get over the fact that we're cooking root vegetables in late June. Sometimes life throws you curveballs. Sometimes those lifeballs come in the form of a semi-regular box of misshapen produce that you're paying to have delivered to your apartment, and in the weird produce choices that said box has been stocked with this week. You can sit and cry about it, like the family of an assassinated Japanese feudal lord, or you can make something great out of your random box of assorted nonsense. So grab your vegetables, peel them, and get to chopping. Now carrots and parsnips tend to be skinny at one end and fat at the other. Skinny chunks of food cook faster than large chunks of food, and since we want all of our food to finish cooking at the same time we're going to have to deal with that. I like to cut them in half to make them easier to work with, a principle which I apply to many of my culinary and business dealings. Then I halve the skinny ends, and I quarter the fat ends. Once you've finished your root vegetable trigonometry, toss them into a bowl along with a smallish pinch of pepper, a large pinch of salt, and 2 TBSP of your olive oil. Throw that mess on to a baking tray, doing your best to keep it in a single layer, and then toss it in to a 400 degree oven for 1/2 an hour. 

This here is why the rice kingdoms fell

Halfway through this process, make sure to take everything back out of the oven, stir it all around, and ineffectually poke at the vegetables with a fork while contemplating whether they'll finish cooking in time. After contemplatively staring at your parsnips for about 2 and a half minutes, throw it all back in the oven for the rest of the cook time. Stir together your honey, mustard, and the rest of your oil until they form a homogenous goop. After your half hour of cooking is up, pour that goop all over your vegetables, stir that nonsense together, and throw it back in the oven for another 15 minutes. You'll know it's done when you start to get some color on the vegetables, everything around your oven begins to smell fantastic, and when 15 minutes have passed. And that's it! Or, well mostly it. Take your vegetables out of the oven. And that's it! Serve them as a snack, a side dish, or a warning to the shinobi tribes operating in the shadows of your local produce store.

Fridge Cleaning Chicken Salad

Strawberries that have terrifyingly gained
sentience agree: you should make this salad.

So I recently signed up for one of those services that are constantly being advertised lately. You know the ones I mean. Where they'll send you misshapen unloveable produce that's still technically good to eat and charge you only a fraction of what you'd pay in the store. You help reduce food waste, and you get to save money! It sounds great, especially with the added enthusiasm of that exclamation mark. And after one week so far, it seems to technically be accurate. The only thing they didn't mention is that the fraction of the supermarket prices that you end up paying is roughly 1/1 (Math jokes. That's why people read this blog, right?). I still feel mildly good for myself about the alleged food waste reduction, and it's easier to buy healthier things when you're picking them out on the internet and you don't have to contend with the allure of the whiskey and cans of frosting aisle at the supermarket, so I'll probably stick with it for another week or two at least. But now I have an unreasonable amount of stone fruits and leafy green things in my fridge that are threatening to turn in to some sort of viscous goo and probably attract fruit flies if I don't actually use them. So I'm going to actually use them.

Ingredients:

1 head of Butter Lettuce
2 Nectarines
1 Carrot
1/3 cup Chopped Walnuts
1/2 a Red Onion
1/2 a Lemon
2 tsp Apricot Raspberry Preserves (For those of you not awesome enough to have access to dual apricot raspberry preserves, just pick one and go with it. I'd pick apricot, but what do I know?)
1 tsp Dijon Mustard
1 TBSP Olive Oil
1 average sized human's pinch of Salt
1 smallish sized human's pinch of Black Pepper
Leftover chicken (Fried. Grilled. Whatever. If you don't have any leftover chicken, either leave it out and have a sad chicken-less salad, or go buy chicken, don't eat all of it, and then you'll have leftover chicken)

The good news is that this is a salad, and that your chicken is already cooked. That pretty much means that all you have to do is assemble ingredients and throw them together in a bowl. The bad news is that you're going to be eating a salad. Fortunately, this thing is going to be so tasty that even people who talk about how they're carnivores because they can't tell the difference between personal preference and actual biology will be gulping down seconds (Biology jokes. That's why people read this blog, right?). So take your lettuce, cut off its butt, and soak it in water to dislodge any dirt or "extra bits of protein." Then roughly chop it and haphazardly throw it in to a bowl. Choppity chop up your nectarines, walnuts, and onion and throw them in to the party. Extra points if you removed the pits from the nectarines. Then shred your carrot, chop up your chicken, and throw them in there too, and you're almost done.

Red tinge to this photo courtesy of the weird lighting
at my apartment today for some reason.

What's left is the dressing, which is where a lot of people go wrong. People either don't understand that you need to actually mix the dressing ingredients together before adding them on to the salad, or they don't add enough dressing, or they add way too much dressing. It's a mess. The basic rule is just be a normal person. If you don't add dressing to your salad, I've got exciting news for you. Acid and fat help you to actually absorb nutrients from the vegetables. So you've been making your food taste worse, and getting fewer health benefits from it. Isn't that great? Whereas if your salad typically looks like it's swimming in a pool of thick goop, you've clearly got some issues to work out before you can be trusted to make food at all. So like I said, just be normal and things will probably work out. Mix together your preserves, mustard, oil, salt, pepper, and the juice from your lemon until the whole mess looks homogenous. Now there's just one last pitfall to try and trip you up. Salad, once dressed, does not hold up well for later use. So if you're feeding a group of people, add the dressing in and mix the salad just before serving it. If you're eating alone in your apartment while binge-watching reality TV and feeling good about yourself for sobbing into a salad for once instead of junk food, dress only the salad you're actually going to eat at that time. And maybe leave out the salt, because the tears will add that for you.

Strawberry Banana Bites

Dramatic reenactment: every picture on the internet ever

A while back a sensation took the internet by storm. To be fair, it's not all that hard to take the internet by storm. Cats and babies do it on a regular basis. But this happened to catch my eye. People make fake ice cream by blending frozen bananas with other flavorings. According to vegan hipster adherents to the trend, it's totally incredible and it tastes exactly like ice cream, and isn't nature wonderful, and by the way if you're not vegan you're basically a war criminal but worse. According to literally everyone else, it's kind of cool. And it tastes...like bananas. If you're expecting ice cream, don't get your hopes up, but if you like bananas then go for it. You see, the thing is, I do like bananas. But since the ice cream thing is a flop anyway, I figured why not blend it up with something that actually tastes good with bananas? And also why bother blending it all up in to an ice cream shape if it doesn't taste like ice cream? Also, I may not have a blender.

Ingredients:

4 Bananas

1 lb. Strawberries

Some of the more mathematically gifted amongst you may have come to the realization that there's not a whole bunch going on in the ingredient department. That's because there doesn't need to be. Bananas are delicious. So are strawberries. They taste great together. End of story. Except I haven't told you how to make them yet, so more like beginning of story. End of the intro of the story? All I know for sure is that the story begins with bananas. As they ripen, bananas turn from green to yellow, and finally to brown. If you leave them too long, to black. If you leave them way too long, probably back to green again. This is important for us to know because bananas also get sweeter as they ripen, as the starch in them is broken down in to fructose. As you may recall, our recipe doesn't have much in the way of ingredients, so we want to make the ones we have count. This is all a long drawn out way of saying that you should make sure to use ripe, sweet bananas. There shouldn't be any green on them, and you should have some brown spots marring the yellow of your peel. Then wash your strawberries, lovingly chop off their green leafy heads, and throw them in a bowl with your bananas.

So what if I like it when my food tries to high five me?

Take your favorite implement of destruction, be it forks, your bare hands, or miscellaneous, and mash the crap out of your bowl of fruit. It doesn't need to be perfectly smooth, but you shouldn't have any major lumps anywhere. Think of it like jazz. If it's too rough, nobody will be able to appreciate the awesomeness. If it's too smooth it loses all of its character and becomes flat and uninteresting. Got it? Good, now let's never speak of this analogy again. Throw that nonsense in the freezer, and then take it out again after about 45 minutes. Mix it together again, breaking up any clumps and crystallization that may have formed. Then splorp it in to some ice cube trays, or the silicon molds you may have bought during your last adventure that you still aren't sick of. Freeze them until they're solid and then enjoy. They're delicious, fairly healthy, and technically frozen which makes them perfect for absurdly hot days. Speaking of which, it's supposed to be in the mid 90s in this weekend in Chicago. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you let me stay at your place this weekend, I'll totally bring you frozen fruit mush. Chicagoans need not apply. 

Yogurt Muesli

I grabbed this hipster cat picture for the muesli pun, but
it's honestly pretty adorable. 

Breakfast times are serious times. They say it's the most important meal of the day. Who this mysterious "they" are, and why they're so deep in the pockets of the French Toast industry has yet to be uncovered by Wikileaks. But unless you want to hear your friends and coworkers constantly lecture you about how terrible it is to skip breakfast, you'd better give in and start eating it. And making sure that you're eating something at least plausibly healthy, or else you're still in for idiots talking to you about your food choices. Isn't peer pressure fun? The problem here, aside from everything, is that while many breakfast foods are undeniably delicious, none of the good ones seem quick or simple to make. You can't roll out of bed 5 minutes before you have to leave for work and make pancakes, fresh squeezed orange juice, and an omlette. So we're faced with the burden of finding tasty, healthy-ish food that we can just grab and go in the morning. Which brings us to muesli.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Steel Cut Oats
1/4 cup Greek Yogurt
1/4 cup Walnuts
1 TBSP Orange Juice
1/4 tsp Honey
Assorted Berries

The first thing you're going to have to deal with when contemplating muesli is its dumb name. Based on some cursory internet research, there seem to be two schools of thought on how to pronounce it. Thre's team "stupid hipster name for a cat "(Mewsly), and team "describing someone who looks kind of like Bullwinkle" (Moosely). Which of these pronunciations is right? I stopped caring like a week before I even thought about making this. On to the actual food. The goal here is to prep this the night before, so you can just grab it and munch in the morning super quickly. Normally I'm not a fan of this sort of devil's math where you sacrifice free time at night for free time in the morning. But this stuff takes like a minute to put together, so it's actually pretty worth it. Mix your oats, yogurt, honey, and orange juice together in a container with a lid. In another container, crush up your walnuts and toss in some berries. Don't worry about crushing up your walnuts, because it's super easy. Walnuts are the cowards of the nut world, and they tend to crumble at the first sign of trouble, as opposed to better organized nuts such as almonds or pistachios. The point is, take your two containers and shove them in your fridge. This entire process should have taken you about 2 minutes. Then go do whatever it is you do at night. Sleep. Drink the blood of innocent. Whatever. The less I know the better.

Frozen berries make this even faster and
easier. You're welcome.

When you wake up in the morning, and the alarm gives out a warning, and you don't think you'll ever make it on time, you'll be grateful for the 2 minutes of work you put in last night. Because you pretty much did all of the work last night, and it wasn't even much work. Just grab your walnuts and berries, toss them in with your yogurt and oats, and consume. You don't even have to mix them together if you want to just go at it parfait style. Whatever floats your muesli boat. It's pretty simple. It's also pretty tasty, healthy, and technically food. Kind of everything you need to consume to not have to listen to the guy from mail room going on for 25 minutes about the health benefits of chia, or his acai bowls, or whatever other absurd fads that nonsense people with no sense of personal boundaries are into these days. Probably yak's milk mixed with powdered horseradish and chamomile tea. You laugh, but it's only a matter of time before internet hipsters are doing that. Anyhow, enjoy your morningtime food and freedom.