Let's talk about tacos

Yet another good thing about moving is that I have seen recipe books that I haven't used in a long time.

So tonight I cooked a meal from a book "Salsas and Tacos" by the Santa Fe School of Cooking.

I decided to make "Tacos of Calabacitas". They are vegetarian tacos. The soft tortillas are dipped in a homemade sauce and then dry fried with the ingredients safely folded inside. I used low carb, high fiber , high protein tortillas. 

First I charred some plum tomatoes under the grill along with a poblano pepper. I chopped the pepper and added it to a frying pan with some onion and garlic and a little olive oil. After a couple of minutes I added the tomatoes and seasoned everything with salt, cumin and oregano.

I let it cook for 15 minutes, adding water to help it reduce down

It was then put in the blender and pureed into a sauce and kept warm until needed.

For the taco fillings I sautéed zucchini (courgette) with some garlic before adding sweet corn, mushrooms, a little adobe sauce and water.
Again, I let this cook down a little.

To serve with the tacos I made some fresh avocado and tomatillo salsa. It was my first time cooking with tomatillos, so I was pretty excited. The salsa consisted of avocado, tomatillo, serrano peppers, white onion and lime juice. It was lovely and fresh. The tomatillo gives an almost crisp green apple finish to the salsa.

The tacos were delicious! The photo does not do them any justice. Here they just look like a pile of brown 'somethings'. I think I was too hungry to be bothered to take a better photo.....
I will definitely make these again and will post a better picture :)

And don't forget to kiss your cook, ESPECIALLY if they cook for you on St. Valentines Day awwwwww.

Blogging about Bobotie

Last night for dinner I made Bobotie, a South African dish. It's the first time I've cooked anything South African.

Bobotie consists of a curried meat layer topped with an egg based layer. It smells GREAT when it's baking!

I got the recipe from the BBC Good Food website, but I made some changes. I couldn't find any allspice berries and so I used powdered all spice instead. I didn't use any sultanas as Matt doesn't like them. Finally I used 1% milk instead of whole fat. I added some greek yogurt instead to try and thicken it up a little.

Matt really enjoyed it! I thought it was nice, but I would not make it again for myself. I will make it again in future though, because Matt said he'd definitely like to have it again.

This morning we woke up to about 5 inches of snow on the ground. So we decided that we'd head down to the Cuyahoga National Park for a snowy walk. We stocked up before hand on a breakfast roll. It contained Irish style bacon, black and white pudding.

To be honest, it looks better than it tasted. The puddings were very plain and not at all spiced.

The walk, however, was great! It was so nice to trounce around in the snow through the woods. We did a relatively short walk, we aren't used to walking much of a distance in snow and so the hills that we usually climb seemed a lot tougher!

Delicious Diet

Now that I've finally unpacked from the move, I have been able to start back up on my low carb diet. It's going great, but I have been craving sweet things (which I don't normally crave, I'm a salty/crunchy kind of girl).
I've really been enjoying my lunches. They consist of tofu noodles, baby bok choy, 2 different types of mushrooms (both from the asia market), soybeans and bean sprouts all in a broth. I then have some greek yogurt for desert (no fat, small amount of carbs and LOTS of protein; 22g per serving!)

I've also started back up on my Chinese. I have my own room upstairs with a little space heater, although I'm not sure I benefit from any of the heat!

My two study buddies seem to hog all the heat!

The big move

Thursday saw a day that I had been dreaming of for a long LONG time... the final departure from Omaha.

Matt and I had managed to load the rental truck with all our belongings on Wednesday. It took a lot of time and energy, but we managed with just the two of us :)

Thursday morning we said goodbye to our first home together. I'm not ashamed to admit that we both had some tears as the realization hit that we were leaving a place with a lot of memories (both good and bad). I can't speak for Matt, but I felt comforted knowing that we were leaving together to continue our journey together.

We managed to leave pretty much on time that morning. We had rented a car dolly so that we could tow my car to Cleveland. That meant that Matt would be doing all the driving. It was a 13 hour drive but he managed to knock it out safely in one day.

Our two travel companions. They were great!

Today we unloaded the truck. Boxes and furniture felt a lot heavier today, our muscles were still recovering from Wednesday's loading.

For those of you who don't already know, my new year resolution is to adhere to a low carb diet (PCOS) and an important part of that is that I am going to have NO alcohol for the year.......... sigh! My mother-in-law had kindly gotten us some boxes from the local grocery store. More specifically they were from the LIQUOR DEPARTMENT! So today, when I would normally have been looking forward to a nice glass of wine at the end of the tough unloading I had to carry wine box after wine box, all with wonderful quotes as to how great drinking wine is!!!! But I have stuck to my guns!!

The low carb eating however has been harder to stick to these past 2 days. On the road we were limited to fast food. Today we haven't been able to easily locate cooking utensils or space to cook in.

So after all the truck was unloaded we ordered pizza.

Tomorrow will be better and I should also be able to go for a good grocery shop.

I did manage to put together the living room so that Matt could play his new Zelda came tonight. He 100% deserves some time to relax after doing all the driving!!!

Desperately Seeking Soup

So for those of you who don't already know the story..... St. Stephens night (the night after Christmas) is the biggest going out night in Ireland. It's the time that you meet up with your friends in your hometown and go around the local pubs.
Last year I was in Ireland for Christmas and so when St. Stephens night rolled around I found myself heading out with Eleanor (my sister) and Orela (my best friend) for a night on the town. We had a wonderful night, but the next day I was suffering a little in the tummy. I didn't eat any breakfast and when the dinner bell rang I approached the dinner table with an anxious trepidation.
Mum placed a bowl of soup in front of me and my nervousness increased as the fragrance hit my nose. But, not wanting to be the naughty daughter, I took a spoonful of soup........ IT WAS THE BEST SOUP EVER!
Ever since then I have been trying to find a soup that I like as much. My butternut squash soup came pretty close, but was not enough.

So today, on it's anniversary, I tried to recreate this soup.

I started by sauteing some onions over a very low heat in butter. I then added some chopped carrots (1 cup) and 2 potatoes. After 10 minutes I added 2 bay leaves and the defatted stock from the turkey. When I say 'defatted' I mean I spooned off all the hard fat from the top. I know there is still fat in the actual stock.
I brought this up slowly to a simmer and then added some chopped ham, green lentils (pre soaked and rinsed) and dried thyme. The boys wanted to head out for a walk around the lake and so I let in cook super low for about 90 minutes before serving with some bread rolls.

The final product was a great soup..... but not on par with my Mums soup. I don't think it can be recreated. Matt suggested that maybe my lack of a hangover this year impaired my appreciation of this years soup. I do find that using actual stock from a roasted bird makes all the difference to a soup. I've been impressed with the concentrated tubs of stock (knorr) but they don't match the real thing.

Tofu Noodle Soup

Tonight for dinner I decided to experiment and I am happy to say that it turned out well.

A while ago I bought some tofu soup seasonings from Cleveland Asia Market. When I went to buy the tofu at my new favorite supermarket (Heinens) I saw that you can get tofu in NOODLE form!!!
It's still just tofu, nothing else is added. I picked up a pack but also picked up a block of regular tofu too, as I had my doubts about the noodles.

I added the tofu soup seasoning to boiling water and then added soup chopped bok choy. I rinsed the noodles well (they stank!) and then threw them into the soup to heat through.

I served with a sprinkling of sliced green onions.

The soup was delicious! The sauce was very flavorful and had a good spicy punch to it. The noodles were surprisingly good too. They don't have the same consistency of regular noodles, but they managed to hold their shape and didn't smush up (I had thought they would turn into mush). I was able to eat them with my chop sticks.

I used the whole packet of noodles (8oz) and I now have a lovely full, warm belly. The calorie count for the noodles? 40 calories per serving, there are 2 servings per bag, so only 80 calories. I am going to try to make spagetti with them some day, as a way to keep the carb count down.

All in all a successful dinner, I'll definitely be making it again soon!

And here is bonus photo, because I think it's just sooooo cute. Here is Penny waiting in the car for Matt in Buffalo. Too cute!

Home Sweet Home

After more than 2 weeks of no internet we finally have the house hooked up!
It was amazing to see how much of an impact no internet had on my daily life at first, it really threw me for a loop. Even something as simple as trying to decide what to make for dinner became complicated when I had no recipes at my fingertips.

I love the house we are living in now. It's older than any of the places we've lived in over here. It has squeaky floor boards, heavy wooden doors and only one room ever becomes truly warm.

I had to laugh at myself the other day.... I had been sitting reading in the living room (the one room that becomes warm) and walked through the kitchen to the downstairs bathroom. I shrieked when I sat on the loo, the toilet seat was freezing!! What made me laugh is that rather than fret about the coldness, I started grinning and thinking how it reminded me of back home in Ireland, where you can be sure that during the winter months your bum will get a cold kiss when ever you visit the loo. And, just like back home in Ireland, if you want to warm yourself up in the house you make yourself a good cup of tea and head to the living room! I have drank more tea since we moved into this house than I have in the past year, it's great!!! I'm making  myself a cup right now! One huge difference is that there is no AGA in the kitchen, so the kitchen doesn't get that lovely warm glow.

In 2 weeks Matt and I will be heading to Omaha for Christmas. We will spend a couple of days getting some stuff in order and then we will go pick Joshua up from Kansas. I haven't seen him since the summer, so I bet he's going to look older already :)
We are going to bring in the New Year in Omaha. We have decided that we are going to try and sell most of our remaining furniture in Omaha rather than bring it all the way here. We don't know where we are going to be or what we are going to be doing after the lease runs out here and so we want to live a little more light weight. There are some things that I am not willing to sell: the tables we got from my Papa and my dining room set, but the rest of the furniture is really rather superfluous at the moment.



We had our first snow on Wednesday. It only snowed for the morning and didn't accumulate much, but it was fun all the same. It was nice to sit at the window in the kitchen and look out at the birds fussing around in the hedges. I am no birdwatcher, but could see that we have several species out there, some with lovely bright blues and reds. Here's a picture of our backyard at the moment...

I am beginning to get used to the area in which we live. The street names are becoming familiar and I am developing a mental grid of the city. We live in a safe enough area, there are several blocks of nice housing on either side of us and so I feel completely safe walking the dogs by myself. However, I am disappointed to see that the homes here are not decorated at the frequency of homes in Omaha for Christmas. I loved walking the dogs around the neighbourhood in Omaha at this time of year, there was a lot to look at (for a change ;)

I have got a job! I will be teaching Anatomy and Physiology at Cuyahoga Community College in January. I am very much looking forward to it, I love teaching and I love the subject matter. What makes it even cooler is that I shall learn something too, as the labs are geared towards medical imaging students and so they will have to interpret various forms of imaging.

Well I think that is all my news for the moment. Now I'm going to go plan the menu for over the weekend :)