Carrots Make a Comeback

After the carrot salad disaster I last posted, I thought I should post something in which carrots really shine.  To be honest, in the best of times I'm not really a fan of carrots.  As a kid I never had a problem with brussel sprouts or broccoli, but carrots.. yuck.  They made me want to vom.  How do you even swallow a raw carrot?  I mean its so difficult because it never reaches a point of mushy swallow-ability.  I only ever took carrots out of the fridge if I was attempting to catch baby bunnies with them in the back yard.  Yes I was that kid.  (Note : These attempts almost always failed, with the exception of once when the bunnies were too young to even move - I don't think their mom was very happy about me playing with them though.  oops...)  

Anyways enough of that.  I discovered the other day that carrots can actually taste good!  The problem is no one knows how to cook them, except maybe Jesse Ziff Cool, because I got this recipe for Honey-Glazed Carrots from her cookbook, Simply Organic.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 1 leek (sliced)
• 1 pound carrots (sliced)
• 1 cup apple juice
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 2 teaspoons chopped fresh mint
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Slice up your leeks and carrots.  I peeled mine because they were really dirty.

Then melt the butter over medium high heat.  Add the leek and cook until its tender.  Then add the carrots and cook until they're lightly browned, about 2 minutes or so.  Then just throw in the rest of the ingredients... Apple juice, honey, cinnamon, cumin mint and salt.  

Reduce the heat to low, cover the pan and simmer it for about 15 minutes - until the carrots are soft.  You should probably remove the cinnamon stick at this point too.  Unless you want to eat it.  Then you'll have a tasty little pile of carrots and you can say to yourself, "Oh my!  How healthy I am!"

And you can eat them and if I'm not mistaken, you'll actually enjoy them!  They're as perfect as carrots could possibly be.  They're tender, and they're sweet like honey, with a bit of tartness from the apple juice.  All of the ingredients are mingling perfectly and the spices just give it a little extra va-va-va-voom to keep you going back for more.  

Infact, they're kinda like this music video, a tantalizing collaboration from Mariah, Mase, and Diddy. 

Asian Inspired Veggie Salad - FAIL

In keeping with my new years resolution I decided to make a big fresh salad for dinner the other night.  I got some new cookbooks for Christmas and one I really like is Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.  It's got a pretty wide range of stuff and food that should please even the non-vegetarian among us.  There is only one downside - she doesn't always pull the whole dish together for you.  She may tell you how to make a sauce, but not what the sauce goes on.  I consider myself a recipe follower, NOT a recipe maker, so this can become a problem as demonstrated with my little salad here.

I used her recipe for Sesame Sauce with Tofu to make a creamy dressing.

Ingredients

• 4 ounces silken tofu
• 1/4 cup tahini
• 1 clove garlic
• Juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 1 tsp dark sesame oil
• salt
• Chopped parsley (I didn't have any but she suggests it)

Whisk all of the above into a blender and you'll get this....

A rich, creamy sesame sauce.  It was pretty good.  I even had Nick taste test it at this point because anything with tofu scares him a little.  He approved.  I had Deborah to hold my hand through making the sauce and then she just sent me on my merry way to come up with the rest of the dish... all alone.  What a bitch.

Since I was going for healthy I grabbed these from my fridge...

And threw them into the food processor with the slicer attachment until they looked like this..

I did the same with about 4 or 5 medium sized carrots.

Then I tossed the carrots and beans with the dressing and voila!  Asian cole slaw?  I don't know.

After we sat down to eat I also had this...

A very, VERY, unhappy husband.  He's not even posing for this picture - seriously.  Its totally candid.  He was really that miserable.  See those two white chunks in his bowl?  Those are just really really big pieces of cheddar cheese he used in an attempt to make the dish less healthy.  Thats also why he has a big glass of coke.

Well if you haven't summed it up yet this probably isn't going into the recipe books anytime soon.  Don't bother making it unless you are one of those super duper healthy raw vegan types.  There's a 99.9% chance you'll hate it.  But if you can think of something else to do with that damn sauce then you should because the sauce was on the money.

Christmas Eve in Cincinnati

Nick and I flew home to Cincinnati for Christmas this year and I was so busy doing nati things I really didn't do much blogging.  So I wanted to back track a bit and share our Christmas festivities with the world.  This year Christmas lasted 3 days and my waistline isn't too happy about that right now.  Here are the culprits from Christmas Eve.

Nick made mojitos for everyone and unsurprisingly they went down like a treat!

Next we have Skyline Dip - sour cream, chili, and cheddar cheese (for you non-Cincinnatians....) Made by my mom.

Shrimp and crab with dips made by my Aunt Niki....

I forget the name of these but they were preserved lemons and cheese wrapped in pastry with a yogurt dipping sauce.  Also compliments of Niki.  They were vegetarian and salty deliciousness which means I ate A LOT of them.

Then we were on to the main course, which for some reason in my family is always Indian themed.  I have no idea where this tradition comes from, but every time I suggest we eat something different I'm told thats absolutely impossible because "It's a tradition."  Specifically, my mom makes Lamb Curry and my Aunt Suzy makes a Saag Paneer type dish.  We also got nan, rice, and mint chutney from Baba India, our favorite Indian Place in Cincinnati.

Look at the spread!

As if we hadn't had enough food at this point we then moved onto dessert.  My mom keeps asking me why I never cook for her, and this is the reason.  Does it look like we need more food?! I suggested I make dessert but she had already bought it from the Bonbonerie.  Their sugar cookies are to die for so I thought it best not to bother competing with them.

We also got some chocolate cupcakes and mint brownies.  Yum!

And of course what would any Cincinnati Christmas celebration be without a large selection of Graeter's Icecream?  If you don't know, Graeter's makes the best icecream in the world.  In Cincinnati no one bothers with those silly boys, Ben and Jerry, and when a Cincinnati girl breaks up with her bf she reaches for a pint of Graeters - not Haagen Dazs.  My cousin, Luc, and my sister, Dani, helped to dish it out in all sorts of flavors.

And that concludes our feast.  Needless to say we all waddled to bed before Santa came!

Cute and Cuddly Overload!

Yesterday Nick and I traveled up to Sheffield to pick out our brand new little bundle of joy - a German Shorthaired Pointer puppy!  We've been looking into getting a dog for a long time now, going to shelters, doing internet research - and it's finally happened!  I was disappointed that we couldn't get a shelter dog because I always loved volunteering at The Anti-Cruelty Society in Chicago, but we just couldn't find what we were looking for in the shelters here.

So yesterday we went to the breeder's home, a lovely newlywed couple, and we were the third to pick from a litter of seven.  That made the task VERY difficult.  Five adorable puppies and we had to choose just one?!

The parents were both family pets so we got to meet both mom and dad.  The mother was a very gentle and sweet girl - absolutely beautiful dog, while the dad was a bit boisterous - but considering the fact that seven puppies with sharp puppy teeth were mistaking his wiener for a an extra nipple... we couldn't really blame him.

We finally narrowed it down to two medium tempered puppies, one boy and one girl, and we decided to go with the girl based on the fact that the breeders said they were generally easier.  Since this is Nick's first dog, and my first dog without parental supervision, we thought this was best.

Isn't she the cutest thing ever?

I don't know what it is about puppies but they just make me want to talk in an annoying high pitched cooing voice and squeeze them.  They're so much cuter than human babies.  I look like an evil puppy stealer in this picture - I just want to take her home!

Nick likes all kinds of small furry animals.  He always wants to put them on his head for some reason....  I told him this was strange and they wouldn't let us have her if he did that.

Luckily he managed to restrain himself and we are taking her home on January 13th.  We are very excited to be puppy parents.  Right now the breeders are calling her Marlene - but we're not really a fan of this.  Since she's a German Shorthaired Pointer we wanted to give her a German name.  I think we're going to call her Heidi.  What do you think?

Goodbye 2009... Hello 2010

By golly, 2009 went by fast!  This has been a hectic but fantastic year for me so I thought I'd share some of the more fabulous moments of 2009 with you...

I graduated in May from Loyola University of Chicago, and thanks to a year of studying abroad I kicked my GPA up so high I graduated with magna cum laude honors - check out those cords.  Thank you Deakin University.  And thank you parents for funding my wildest dreams.

I was also super busy planning what many referred to as "the social event of the summer" - thats right the Vollman/DeCourcy Wedding.  After 8 years of internet dating and obscene amounts of money spent on phone bills and airfare Nick and I got married July 17th.

After the wedding we moved to London and we got married again.... Actually we never really got married the first time!  HA tricked you!  It was all pretend because of the immigration stuff.  Here we are signing the legal papers.  It was a bit of an anti-climax after the first one.

Since moving to London I have been steadily improving my housewife skills with cooking and decorating.  I also learned how to knit - an achievement I suppose.  I applied to lots of jobs and I got one, but it sucked and I don't have it any more.  We just got back from a two week visit to Cincinnati and we had lots of fun there.  It's been a great year....

But of course today is January 1st and what would January 1st be without a few goals?  So here are a few for 2010.

1. Get experience for vet school
2. Do more and stop thinking about doing more
3. Be proactive about establishing myself in London
4. Be active and healthy and quit yo-yo dieting (cliche I know)
5. Make a really good new English friend

Happy New Year Everyone!