Being the live-in cook for a pregnant women gives you cause to learn all sorts of fancy tricks with your food. My wife’s tastes right now change weekly, sometimes daily, and even she cannot predict them herself. But I know that I need to make sure she is still getting lots of “the good stuff” – the good stuff right now being protein, calcium, and fats (specifically omega-3s for brain development). Given that she’s had a pretty significant meat aversion since almost the start of the pregnancy, the protein bit has been a little tricky sometimes.

And me, being a runner – I am always trying to pack as much protein as I can into my meals without having to resort to powders or bars. So when I skimmed over this recipe in the January issue of Runner’s World I knew it would be perfect for us.

Amanda *will not* eat yogurt. And that’s not a pregnancy thing, she just won’t. No matter how hard I try. Can’t deal with the texture of it. But it’s high in protein, calcium, and fats so it’s one of the better foods out there for her right now. So what better way to get her to eat some than including it in one of her favorite foods – mashed potatoes? She still doesn’t even know, I’m hoping that by posting this recipe I won’t ruin the dish when she reads about it.

I, on the other hand, love Greek yogurt. It’s simple, it’s quick, you can easily add fruit, nuts, or honey – or even chocolate, and it’s got a great protein-to-calorie ratio.

Check out our secret weapon…

Also – with this recipe, the potatoes are steamed before they’re mashed. This retains more of the natural vitamins and minerals in the potato, which are otherwise leached out into the water if they’re boiled. It takes a little longer but it’s a better deal in the end. I don’t have a steamer, so I use a make-shift one by putting my colander in a stock pot.

Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 25 minutes

Ingredients…

- 6 russet potatoes (or any potato good for mashing)
- 1 cup Greek yogurt (I used Fage 2%)
- 1 pat of butter
- salt and pepper

The recipe is super simple.

1. Wash and dice the potatoes. Make it a small dice so it will steam quicker.

2. Bring water in your boiler (or stock pot) to a boil, and add potatoes to steamer. Cover.

3. Steam potatoes for 20-25 minutes, until the largest pieces are fork tender.

4. Remove potatoes and put them in a large bowl. Mix in 1 cup Greek yogurt.

5. Mash potatoes along with yogurt in the large bowl. Add salt and pepper (and some herbs if you like) to taste.

6. Serve with a pat of butter on top to melt over it.

You don’t even ever have to tell your unsuspecting diners about how you just beefed up their potatoes into something way better for them. It may be better if they never find out, in fact. It can be our little secret.

Over the holidays, my brother and his family from Hawai’i came to visit with us for a little over a week or so. You may remember a little from this post that I have one older brother, Matthew, who lives in Maryland with a wife, Margaux, and two kids (Anna and Peter) and another older, older brother Sean, who lives in Hawai’i with his wife Lurana, and two twin girls – Ruby and Teia.

Recently I’d been hearing snippets here and there about some kitchen adventures and activities that Lurana had been able to get her kids to participate in – at least with a small degree of success – so I thought I would embrace that as their Christmas gift and see if I couldn’t do something to encourage it.

So we got them some personalized chef’s gear.

They’re still working on the whole idea that the rolling pin is NOT a weapon.

It took a little while to bring some focus to the whole endeavor (I had to compete with the marble rollaway toy pictured in the background of the first two pictures, and if you’ve ever played with one of those you know that is some stiff competition), but once we got going the girls were great.

To try out the new gear, we decided to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies and a batch of coconut macaroons.

The most common question… can we taste the cookie dough yet?

Anna helped out too, she was just as involved as the others.

The coconut macaroons were really awesome but the yield was pretty low (like 10 cookies). I’d suggest at least doubling the recipe to make it even worth making because they will definitely go fast.

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 18-20 minutes

Ingredients…

- 1 cup shredded coconut
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1/8 tsp cream of tartar
- 1 egg white

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees fahrenheit.

2. Separate the egg yolk from the egg white, reserve the yolk and try to find another use for it.

I was pretty impressed here… Teia had no fear of working with the egg and was happy to volunteer to separate out the white.

Okay, next step…

3. Add the egg white and cream of tartar in a medium sized bowl.

4. Beat with an electric mixer (you can do it by hand if you want, too) until the whites are fluffy and peaked. Gradually add the sugar. Almost done…

5. Bake in the oven for 18-20 minutes or until the flakes are just turning golden brown. The kitchen will smell fantastic as the coconut toasts.

Me: “So, Ruby, you know now that you have your chef’s hat and apron and cookbook, you can make these cookies at home any time you want.”

Ruby: “What! No, we can’t.”

Me: “Of course you can – you know how to do it now.”

Ruby: “But they won’t ever be good. They won’t be as good as these cookies now.”

Me: “Sure they will, why wouldn’t they be?”

Ruby: “Well … cause… we won’t have an expert there to make them with us.”

<3

Just over a year ago, a close friend of mine started up a nice, cozy little spot on the internet for herself by the name of Three Baking Sheets to the Wind. In doing so, Ali – the author of TBSTTW – found an outlet for writing about her passions in baking and craft beer, and unknowingly set the wheels in motion that ultimately led to me creating this site and starting my own writing here.

I didn’t really ever used to read blogs. Maybe once in a blue moon I might stumble onto an article I liked, randomly, but I was pretty oblivious to what was out there. And I was pretty oblivious to the effort that so many people were putting in all over the internet to create some really amazing material that is far from bounded by any one particular theme or topic. When Ali started writing, and I witnessed what she was doing, a light bulb went on over my head.

I had always had a passion for cooking, and not just for cooking but for food in general – food knowledge, just about anything related to it. And as a student of philosophy, I always enjoyed writing. But I never had much of an outlet for either in my adult life, apart from the cooking done in my own kitchen and the occasional rant on some obscure forum. Watching Ali launch her blog, and her subsequent writing, it was immediately clear that this was exactly the kind of outlet I had been (subconsciously) looking for, though I may never have seen it myself without being shown.

I launched right into it without much forethought whatsoever. In some ways, I do regret that a bit – I could have been a little more prepared. But it felt like a mission then. It took me about 5-6 weeks to get all my shit together, and then My So-Called Knife was launched. We’ve spent the past year now doing this thing, and having her there to bounce ideas off of, benchmark, and commiserate with has been extremely helpful. I have learned so much.

My wife and I have known Ali and her husband for 6-7 years now and we’ve all had the pleasure to grow through several different stages of our lives as friends. I’m thankful for that time in the past and optimistic for more in the future. We have a number of shared readers of both our blogs – which is awesome – but if you haven’t yet had the chance to check out Three Baking Sheets to the Wind, there’s no better time than the present. Ali’s writing is funny, sarcastic, informative, nostalgic, and there’s no questioning that she knows her way around an oven.

Happy 1st Birthday, Three Baking Sheets.

The wife and I took a little road trip over the New Year’s weekend – we drove up to Pittsburgh with her parents and younger brother for the NHL Winter Classic. Though we’re not particularly huge hockey fans generally speaking, the Winter Classic is a big deal, played outdoors in a football stadium on New Year’s Day, and the Caps were in the game this year facing off against rivals the Pittsburgh Penguins. Her parents, Caps season ticket holders themselves, invited us along for the weekend, so we were happy to accept.

Plus it gave us a chance to break in our new baby-mobile, a used CR-V that we picked up a couple weeks ago in early December. After being crammed into a two-door Accord for the past ten years, it was a welcome change and a very nice ride.

We drove up on Friday (about 4-5 hours from Northern VA) afternoon. Amanda and I had been left with the responsibility of selecting a restaurant for NYE dinner – an honor, certainly, and not a complaint – so I had done some previous research. We found a spot in the Pittsburgh suburbs called Hyeholde Restaurant and it was amazing. The venue of the restaurant was an old castle that was built by a groom for his bride in 1931. The castle was built with his own hands and took 7 years to complete, and in 1938 the couple hosted their first meal there.

The NYE tasting menu was really wonderful. I can’t account for everyone’s meal, but I indulged in…

- Demitasse of chicken and duck consommé with wild rice and pomegranate seeds
- Kumomoto oysters
- Intermezzo of pomegranate and orange sherbet
- Cervena elk with red and green cabbage and potato galette
- Pomegranate, beet, and blood orange salad
- Egg nog bread pudding

The meal was paired with a fantastic bottle of Malbec and completed with a glass of Laphroaig 18 year single malt.

My biggest comment about the whole meal was – WOW, elk! All the dishes were tasty, but the main blew me away. It was my first time eating elk and it most certainly won’t be my last. I have been anxious to try it sometime for awhile now – especially since I have easy access to it any time through my Arganica connection. But I was reluctant to try it in my own kitchen first, especially with Amanda being a bit averse to meat in general lately on account of the pregnancy. Really though, this elk steak was as good as any filet mignon I’ve ever had. Better. Really, so impressive. Amanda liked it, too. I’m a believer.

We had a quiet, nice, classy NYE and rang it in together there at the restaurant. Which is really all we wanted anyway.

The next day was the day of the Classic. It had been raining all morning and what was to be a 1pm faceoff was delayed to 8pm. So we went downtown to hang out near the stadium and just bum around for a bit.

The Winter Classic was a lot of fun. 68,000 people there, Caps and Penguins fans swarming all over Pittsburgh. Lots of friendly and not-so-friendly competitive jabbing everywhere you turned. Plenty of language overheard that I will soon by working to eliminate from my vocabulary. But in the end, the Caps delivered the big win at 3-1 final score.

Thanks to Bill and Terri for the great little weekend getaway. I’m pretty sure the baby girl had a good time, too. A Caps fan in the making? … I’m sure nothing would make them happier.

She’s gotten quite hard to hide these days. 18 weeks left.

Happy New Year to all!

I’m just saying. I mean, really.

I’m not typically one for resolutions. A resolution, to me, is something you choose to do – usually something borne out of guilt – not because you want to, but because you feel like there’s some necessity to do something like that sometime around this part of the year. I don’t buy it, not for a second. If you want to be a better person, don’t make a resolution to do so. Just be a better person. Change your life. Don’t resolve to make a fix, but choose to change. For all your life, and not just the first three weeks of January. Resolution is a dirty word.

So on that note, there are a few things I am continuing to do and some major life events coming in the immediate future. This is a ridiculously exciting time in my life. And I can barely even see past the first half of 2011 right now what with how full it already is.

January: get my PMP, go to ARUBA on our babymoon. Eff. Yes.

February: 2 year wedding anniversary.

March: Last month of training for my ten mile race, and inevitably some major blizzard.

April: I turn 30! Amanda turns 30! And we both die of anticipation waiting for…

May: The big D-Day. D as in DUE, that is. 5/7/2011, as it stands currently.

And then we both have nearly the next three months off to spend together with our baby girl. Paternity leave – SCORE.

All that is just half the year coming up, and doesn’t even account for all the little (and big) unexpected things that are bound to come up. While I am absolutely enjoying this time in my life right now (yes – I said it, I am *enjoying* my wife being pregnant – it’s true, I swear)… the future can’t get here fast enough.

Bring it on, 2011.

Okay so maybe they’re not his favorite, I never asked the guy to know for sure, but they’re certainly MY favorite. And I’ve had a lot of chocolate chip cookies in my day. Though I guess I’d have to admit he’s probably got me beat on that tip. The man is undoubtedly a fully fledged cookie connoisseur.

Nevertheless, these are damn good chocolate chip cookies. I’ve been making them for many years now, the original recipe came from a Cooking Light cookbook. Generally I’m not a huge fan of the Cooking Light stuff cause I tend to prefer the real products (i.e. butter, etc.) to the “lite” or “low-fat” or “diet” alternative substitutions that you’ll often find in their recipes. But there have been a few notable exceptions – these cookies being one of them.

What really makes these unique – at least of any other cookies I’ve used before – is the use of applesauce.

Yes – applesauce.

Applesauce replaces the white sugar that would normally be used in a regular chocolate chip cookie recipe. The applesauce itself is pretty sweet, so you get just as much sweetness, and it makes for a really great texture in the cookie, too. You really don’t get any of the apple taste coming through in the final product, so while it might sound weird it actually works out quite perfectly. You can also experiment with cinnamon applesauce for a slightly more holiday-esque type cookie. You get soft, chewy, fluffy, chocolatey perfect cookies.

And, of course, by leaving the white sugar out, you’re also cutting back on total calories. Bonus.

So I suggest whipping up a batch (or three) of these for Christmas – or whatever holiday or non-holiday you’ve elected to observe this year – and indulge. I’m confident you’ll be glad you did.

Prep time: 20 minutes
Refrigerate time: 1-2 hours
Cook time: 10-12 minutes per baking sheet

Ingredients…

- 3/4 cups white flour
- 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 3/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup applesauce
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 1 tbsp vanilla extract
- 1 large egg
- 1 cup chocolate chips

You don’t need to use two different types of flour if you don’t have them available, it will turn out fine just with all-purpose flour. But I like to mix it up, I feel it gives it a more rounded out consistency.

The original Cooking Light recipe calls for reduced fat margarine and chocolate chips and you save about 20 calories per cookie. Feel free to go this way if you like, for me it’s not worth it.

I encourage some possible experimentations: white chocolate chips, dark chocolate, pecans, walnuts, macadamia nuts, etc. Mix and match.

1. Spoon applesauce out into a sieve over a bowl and let drain for 15 minutes. If you don’t have a sieve, you can use a paper towel and it will do the trick. Discard the liquid and put the drained applesauce into a large bowl.

2. Combine dry ingredients except for brown sugar (flour, baking soda, salt) in a bowl and whisk together.

3. Add brown sugar and butter to large bowl with applesauce and beat with a mixer on medium about 2-3 minutes, until fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla extract.

4. Gradually add the flour mixture into the large bowl while running the mixer until everything is well mixed.

5. Mix in the chocolate chips, nuts, etc. with a fork or spoon.

6. With a sheet of wax or parchment paper spread out, make the dough into a roll / snake that is about 1 – 1 1/2 inch circumference. Refrigerate for 1-2 hours. You can skip this step if there is a necessity for COOKIES RIGHT NOW IMMEDIATELY!!! but, if at all possible, refrigerating them will keep them from flattening out too much when they are baked and you’ll get a better final product in the end.

7. Preheat oven to 375 degrees fahrenheit.

8. Take your dough roll out of the fridge and slice into cookie size discs/balls and drop onto the baking sheet (my dough roll turned out a little big so I halved each disc before putting them onto the sheet). Bake for 10-12 minutes until golden and fluffy.

9. Remove cookies from pan, let cool slightly on wire racks. Best when eaten warm!

I hope you love these cookies as much as I do. There’s no need that they only be made for Santa, as they are fantastic all year round.

Happy Holidays everybody! I hope you’ve been having a great holiday season and will get the opportunity to enjoy these next couple weeks with your loved ones. I may or may not be posting much next week, I’m just going to play it by ear. I have some major stuff going on (rest assured – it’s ALL good stuff) so I just can’t really say what will happen. Cheers!

The resorts have opened up, and snowboarding season is officially upon us. We even got about 2 or 3 inches of snow on the ground here in Northern Virginia last Thursday – enough to get me out of the office early but not really much else.

I’ll be heading out for a day trip this Thursday to hit the mountain and dust off all my old gear. In the meantime here’s a video I’ve got to share from last year, when I learned to snowboard in my backyard. We had two feet of snow on the ground for the majority of the weekend, and I live in a spot with a large-ish (large is relative) hill on the side so of course I had to take advantage of it. My filmmaker friend Zak, who I’ve known since high school (middle school?) put it together for us.

This video evidence of my learning to snowboard may or may not be partially responsible for my broken wrist last winter that I got when I headed up to an actual resort.

Running!

After my week long PMP training stint, getting out to stretch my legs a bit was a welcome change. I really haven’t been able to fit any significant amount of running, or exercise at all, in the past couple weeks. So that’s what kind of holiday season I’ve been having, if you were wondering. Which is not to say bad, just merely.. passing in the blink of an eye.

So just kind of on a lark, I entered into the lottery registration process for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race in early April, 2011. I figured it’s a really popular race, the likelihood of actually getting drawn is slim, and if I do then it’ll just be good motivation to keep me running over the winter – which I had some serious trouble with last year (meaning: it didn’t happen).

And of course, I was drawn and I am officially entered in the race. Which I’m *totally* excited about. BUT – it’s cold outside!!!

I’m going to try my damnedest to run this race in April being fully trained and ready for it, unlike the half marathon I ran back in the spring. Last thing I want to do is wind up fucking up my knee again.

To that end I’m going to be more thorough. I’m devising a training schedule.

I want to run 12 miles three times before the race, on April 3rd. And I want to taper off my training the last week or week and a half so I’m well rested. That means I’m going to be doing a lot of running in February and March. If you live anywhere near the DC area, you might remember that last year we were buried under a massive amount of snow in early February. And then, when it had all just about melted, once again in early March.

If we have anything like the kind of snow we had last year, I’m going to be stuck on the dreadmill all winter. Let’s hope it doesn’t go that way.

Of course this is all best case scenario, which will surely never be achieved. But the guideline helps.

And you’ll probably notice that I’m not really going to consider the training period to start until the new year. I figure I’ll get some runs in now before then, but that will be when I really start in earnest. Right now I can run about 3-5 miles pretty comfortably, up to 6 or 7, maybe 8 if I push it.

But I think the hardest part is going to be doing this in the winter. The only treadmill I have access to is at work and while I don’t mind doing a brief 3 miles on a treadmill, 7 or 8 or 10 is an entirely different story. It’s just so boring. I will need to get outdoors as much as possible.

At any rate I am really looking forward to this race. It will be beautiful, in a great location at a wonderful time of year. I am one of a lucky 10,000 runners.

Cheers to having fitness goals to get me through the holiday gluttony.

Okay how about a recipe post for once? It’s been awhile. They are tending to be a little more few and far between with so much “life shit” going on these days. I’m still managing to find time to cook for the most part, although last week – training week – was pretty awful food wise. I won’t get into it. It’s depressing.

ANYWAY. We had a big celebratory dinner the other night, just for no good reason really, so I suppose celebratory isn’t necessarily the right word other than that we were simply celebrating all that’s good and right. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

That dinner included some filet mignon from Polyface Farms – a delicacy for sure. We also had wild caught lobster tail and some potatoes Bearnaise. Since I so rarely talk about steak here – or even red meat in general – we’re gonna focus on the filets.

One of my favorite ways to prepare a choice cut of beef is to use a simple bloody mary marinade. This marinade consists of a tomato liquid mixture (juice, paste, sauce, V8, etc.), some quality vodka (I like Belvedere, myself) and a little salt and pepper.

Now, a wet marinade is never going to do *too* much to affect the flavor of a cut of meat, because even if you rotate the meat in a tumbler it’s never going to get too far absorbed – it just doesn’t work that way. At best you’ll get maybe 10%-15% absorption if you’re thorough about turning it (or if you actually own a meat tumbler). Dry rubs are the way to go for flavor absorption.

But that doesn’t speak for tenderizing. Acidic marinades (wine, vinegar, tomatoes, citrus) break down the protein bonds within the meat making for a more buttery and delicious cut. Filet is already a tender piece of meat to begin with, so the bloody mary treatment on one of these gives you a seriously succulent piece of beef.

I’m not going to bother structuring this like a typical recipe post, cause… well I don’t know, it doesn’t really seem like a recipe. Except for the marinade part, I guess.

Ingredients…

- tomato juice/sauce/paste/V8
- 2-3 oz vodka (don’t cook with it if you wouldn’t drink it)
- salt
- pepper

Make sure you start with a good piece of meat. This can’t be overstated. If you don’t have a good piece of meat when you start cooking, nothing you can do will give you a good piece of meat when you are finished. The cheapest filet mignon you can score at the big box grocery is NOT a good piece of meat. You get back what you put in here. The Polyface filets set us back about $20/lb., which is by no means cheap, but you can taste where your money goes. And it just means we don’t eat filet all that often – which is for the best for quite a number of reasons.

So – make enough of that marinade to completely cover the meat.

Marinate for at least 4-6 hours, turning the container once every hour or so for best absorption.

When you’re ready to cook, use a cast iron skillet and bring it up to a pretty high heat like 7 or so out of 10. With just a small drizzle of oil, sweat some onions or some scallions in the skillet for a minute.

Then add the filets.

As you start your filet on the stovetop, turn your oven on to 400 fahrenheit. We’ll need it in a few minutes.

All you want to do with the filet in the skillet here is sear the outsides, so don’t leave it on any one side for more than 2-3 minutes. And yes, you can use the sides too. I always do, but I think maybe it’s kind of a personal preference thing. I think they cook more evenly this way though.

After you’ve got each side seared, throw the whole thing (with skillet) in the oven. Depending on the size of the filet, you’ll need anywhere from 5-10 more minutes or so in the oven.

What we’ve done here is seared the outsides so we will lose minimal juices while we use the radiant heat of the oven to bring the rest of the meat up to temperature. If you like it really bloody, you can skip this step – or just do it for a few short minutes – but make sure you let the meat rest awhile so that carryover cooking will give you something edible.

Once your meat is cooked, you need to test for doneness. Whatever you do, don’t just slice it open and look. I’ve seen far too many people take a piece of meat directly off the heat and slice it open to see how it’s cooked without even waiting for it to rest, in case they need to put it back on. You lose just about all your juice and flavor this way. Instead, teach yourself how to test for doneness by feeling the meat and feeling how hard it is.

It’s easier than it sounds. Use your hand as a guide.

With your fingertips touching your thumb tip, press a finger from your other hand on the large part of your palm right under your thumb. That should be about similar to the resistance that you get from your piece of meat.

So, for instance, if you have your thumb and your index finger touching, your palm should be pretty supple and springy – that’s what a rare piece of steak will feel like. If your thumb and middle finger are touching, it’ll be a bit harder. And so on. Go ahead and try it now, you’ll see what I mean.

Once you’ve got your meat to the desired doneness, make sure to let it rest for at least ten minutes. It won’t get too cold, because it’s still cooking at this time. And the juices are re-absorbing into the piece of meat instead of being lost all over your cutting board.

I would normally prefer a slightly rarer piece than the one pictured below, but I AM cooking for a pregnant woman these days…

… and that pretty much trumps everything.