1/2 box of pasta
1 head of garlic
1/2 lemon (or enough for a few squeezes)
crushed red pepper
salt and pepper

1. Take a pyrex baking dish (smaller the better) and put a 3 inch wide dollop of olive oil in it. Chop off the tip of your garlic head and place on top of oil dollop. Cover the whole shebang with tinfoil, and bake in the oven on 450 for 45 mins.

2. Once the garlic is almost done… at around 10 mins or so: In a large saucepan, pour a very thin layer of water and put the head of chopped, clean kale in (I prefer to rip the leaves one by one and bypass the stem– but the stem is where there’s some good nutrients, so it’s up to you), add a good amount of salt and pepper, and cover the pan on medium-high heat, so that the kale boils/steams (this is my lazy way of steaming quick). At this time, I usually have the pot boiling for the pasta too.

3. Once the kale is cooked until desired texture, drain any excess water and stir some chili flakes in. Hopefully your garlic is ready by now, so go ahead and add that too, by popping out all the cloves from the head (this should be the fun part). The oil from the garlic cloves should be enough to oil up the kale, but you can add more oil if you’d like. Squeeze some lemon juice in there too, but not too much. Two or three squeezes.

4. Take your cooked pasta and work in little sections into the kale in the saucepan. You may need to add some oil in at this point, but I always try to have as little oil as possible. If it’s a hot day, I like to run cold water over the cooked noodles (soba style) and put the hot kale on top. Eat immediately.

5. Other tasty additions: fresh grated parmesan/nutritional yeast (for vegan foodies), pitted marinated kalamata olives, sauteed/carmelized onion, fresh raw chopped red bell peppers, cucumber, chilled red wine. 

6. Eat dark chocolate for desert. Always.

Regards,

Foodyi

This trip [to Whole Foods] was very motivated by cravings. I am also proud of myself for keeping my bill under $30, almost unknown at a whole paycheck/whole foods. And that $30 will provide me with 2 meals with about 2-3 servings each, which means about 5 meals total. I can’t stand wasting a shred of food, so I stretch out every bit until it’s gone, and (mostly, somewhat) fresh.

Clockwise from the quinoa pasta:

Quinoa Pasta: I had this at my friend tif’s house a few nights ago and it blew my mind with how wheat-like it was (i am gluten-free). And it’s also super cheap! It’s light and stringy, just like i like my linguine. I guess its pretty hard to fuck up linguine. I want to make it with a pesto-walnut sauce, but not this time around. These will go with kale, garlic, onion, and…

2  Yellow Tomatoes! …for the pasta dish. I couldn’t resist. Theyre just so pretty! I love tomatoes in everything so i had to buy them for this dish. normally I wouldn’t include them with the kale, but just a little for color will be nice. 

1 Hothouse Cucumber: for my sandwich tonight/next three days. It was fresh, firm, like a cucumber should be. This was a craving of mine today– it was included in my simple yet satisfying sandwich that i made, which I will elaborate more on in a bit.

Firm tofu: tofu is great. Tofu is a staple of mine, because it can do it all. Sometimes it can vaguely (with a lot of imagination) taste cheese like (okay, this is a stretch maybe), and it’s just SO good on a sandwich. plus, unlike extra firm, it’s light in the tummy. Extra firm is too heavy for me. This is perfect. Great for steaming and crumbling and puree-ing. 

Unsweetened Soymilk: For my cereal. boring. staple. 

Texas Yellow Onion: Another staple. gotta always have onion and garlic in the house. This is for the kale pasta dish.

Pitted Kalamata and Green Olives with Peppers from the Olive Bar: these were central to my craving today. I love these pitted marinated olives, the kalamata ones (or i think they might be of the provencal variety), which are nice and salty and taste oh so good with a bit of roasted cashews as a snack. I like olives because theyre hearty too. only need a little bit. this was a more splurge-y item, a novelty item, but at $3.90 for the satisfaction that will keep on coming for at least 3 more times, I was fine with it.

Kale: KALE! my favorite veg. Well, tomatoes are my favorite, but these maybe are in the top 5. kale is so so good for you– beta carotene, vitamin C, cancer fighting!! This veggie does it all! eat eat eat eat

Garlic: I hate how Whole Foods sells garlic by the bitsy this way, but a head from Ralphs will usually sprout before i can finish it. It was either this or the elephant garlic which was truly elephantine. Like the size of the onion, almost.

Gluten-Free Loaf: yummmmmmmmmmmmmmm gluten free bread! What I miss most about not eating gluten is fresh bread. I love bread. Whole Foods has a gluten free bakery (but not at every Whole Foods i dont think) and charge an arm and a leg for it, but what the hell, it’s such a rarity. Once in a while I gotta let myself live. This is made with tapioca flour, chickpea flour, brown rice flour and some walnuts in it. It was so good with my sandwich tonight: sliced tofu, avo, cucumber, tomato, marinated olives, and a little olive oil/balsamic/S+P. I like to keep it simple.

Dates (not pictured): Nature’s candy. I ate them for dessert with some cashews. 

I’d say all in all it was a pretty satisfying trip. Whole Foods takes a lot of will and determination to navigate through on a dime, but if you’re willing to not read every anecdote next to peruvian mountain goat cheese for $18.99/lb. I think you’ll make out alright.

A question I always ask myself when I see a dish is, “how did the chef think to use that particular ingredient, and not something else?” Why use vinegar, not lemon juice? Does using tarragon instead of thyme really make a difference? The fact of the matter is, many ingredients can be interchangeable and it is mostly up to the chef as to what flavor combination he prefers. He could easily use vinegar or lemon juice, he just knows he needs a type of acid to cut through the richness he tastes in the dish.

I learned a lot about flavor affinities and how ingredients are coordinated in a dish through The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. It’s a fascinating catalogue/dictionary of commonly used ingredients and other ingredients they are most compatible with according to tradition, modern trends, and/or respected professional opinions within the industry. 

This isn’t directly related to how I came to incorporate butternut squash puree into my bowl of mac & cheese, but it’s all part of my new effort to be more adventurous, more risk-taking when it comes to creating flavor combinations. While the “risk” was probably more in my audacity to add organic butternut squash puree from last season’s CSA share into a bowl of boxed macaroni dressed in re-hydrated orange powder, I still give myself a pat in the back for thinking outside the box.

Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese

Boil macaroni using directions in the box.

Use about ¾ the amount of liquid the box asks you to use to make cheese sauce

Add about ¼ cup of Greek yogurt into sauce (you don’t have to use Greek yogurt, but I find it gives it a creamier texture than normal yogurt, and an added richness you don’t get from making the cheese sauce with just water/milk)

Mix in 1 cup of butternut squash puree to cheese sauce

Fold cheese sauce into macaroni

Pairs well with: Charles Shaw Blend, Shiraz, California 2007

So here is my rendition of “What’s in My Purse.” While it’s not as sex offender friendly, this particular grocery trip was just as equally disturbing and odd.It’s never a good idea to walk to a grocery store starving because you’re mind goes haywire and you end up leaving with the entire store or with a bag of items that looks stolen from a pothead’s hands. I went in with a mission. A mission to come out with a bag of sticky white rice and frozen peas so I could make some sort of fried rice with the lone egg I had in my fridge. This is what happens when you go shopping under the influence of hunger.

You end up with some weird shit you never thought you’d buy. Hot dogs?? Animal crackers circa 1984?? Let me go back, to the left, and clockwise.

1. Long-grain White Rice: I’ve been finding it really difficult to find short-grain, sticky, sushi, white rice in any grocery store besides Whole Foods. I don’t know what it is because stores will sell tex-mex rice, saffron rice, wild rice, arborio rice, but not short grain white rice. Seriously? There are about 4 billion of us on this earth…

2. Barnum’s Animal Crackers: I wanted something sweet, but I didn’t want a huge box of cookies sitting in my pantry either. It was an easy solution, complete with childhood memories and easy lid to open as I perused the rest of the lanes.

3. Can of Goya Black Beans: I don’t know what I was going to do with these, but a can of beans is always a nice addition to the pantry. Maybe some black beans & rice?

4. Frozen Peas: another kitchen staple that can come in handy during those late night dinners you come home to so often after a hard day’s work. Poor you.

5. Whole-Wheat Saltine Crackers: I swear, if I didn’t eat so much salt, I’d probably lose five pounds in the amount of water my body retains. At $1.75 a box, these are the cheapest and tastiest way (especially with peanut butter & jelly) to satisfy my salty tooth. I’m pretty sure I can win the saltine cracker challenge. 

6.  Annie’s Organic Mac & Cheese: When you’re starving late at night and walking by the pasta section, my best way to save face when purchasing “the blue box”  is to go organic. [More to come on how this was the best investment I made that night]

7. Two Bananas: I felt guilty for buying all these snacks so I circled back around to the vegetable/fruit aisle and picked up these two bananas. You can imagine the kind of anxiety and stress I undergo everytime I’m at a grocery store.

8. Hebrew National’s Reduced-Fat Beef Franks: I don’t even have an answer to these. I only picked these up because I recently had a conversation with a friend about how I used to eat them stir fried with peppers and onions over rice as a kid, instead of a hot dog bun. That sounded good at the moment. But now they’re just sitting in my fridge only to stand in place as an edible piece of nostalgia.

Grand Total: $15.32

I’m not usually this nostalgic when it comes to grocery shopping. It might be my upcoming trip to LA that is muddling my focus, which I’m terribly excited for (BBQ and sun, here I come!). It’s also the reason you don’t see any fresh produce/perishable items.

While my contents may be more alluring to someone organizing a can food drive, I think they’re just as telling and intriguing as an expired inhalor or spare keys to mom’s Ford Explorer. So there.

Up next: What’s in YOUR Grocery Bag Los Angeles?