How to make granola!

So, since the only commercial breakfast cereal I can eat these days is Rice Chex (and Corn Chex, but it's not as good), I've been making a lot of granola. It's gluten-free if you aren't sensitive to oats (which sometimes are manufactured on equipment that does wheat and has trace amounts of gluten in it). Oats have been no problem for me and my joints, so I've been eating a lot of them.

The fun thing about granola is that once you get gist of making it, you can make it with anything you want. My mom made this when we were kids, with just oats, almonds and sunflower seeds, so I took the basic idea and threw in whatever else I could scrounge up. The flax seeds are for nutrition rather than any exciting flavor (they've got the Omega-3s and a lot of fiber) but they add a little extra crunch. Here's the recipe I've been making lately...

Coconut-Almond Granola

4 TB of salted butter (if you're anti-butter for some reason, you could use vegetable oil, but I will recommend you to the Weston Price folks who, slight bit of kookery or not, have convinced me that real animal fats are good and that fake, freaky margarine-style fats are evil.)
3 TB honey (or more)
2 cups of rolled oats
1 cup of sliced almonds
1 cup of shredded unsweetened coconut
1/2 cup of raw sunflower seed kernels
1/4 cup of flax seeds
2/3 cup raisins (or however much you want)
2/3 cup Craisins (or any other dried fruit you feel like)

Here's how it works:

1. Melt the butter and the honey in a big sauce pan.
2. Dump in everything except the raisins/Craisins/dried fruit.
3. Stir it all around thoroughly until everything is coated in butter and honey. The mix should look glossy but not wet, and still be crumbly.
4. Spread the granola out onto a jelly roll pan. Bake at 325 for 10 or 15 minutes or until its mostly golden brown, or a little darker. (Check on it periodically...ovens are tricky, and you don't want it to burn. You can bake it at 200 for longer, if you'd rather be more careful.)
5. Take it out of the oven, and mix it up while it's still warm or it'll cool together in clumps. It will stop being sticky as it cools. Once it's cool, dump it in an airtight container (or a leftover Quaker Oatmeal tub) and add whatever raisins, Craisins, or other dried fruit you want.

Done and done.


I eat mine with milk, like a regular cereal. Or with yogurt. Or straight out of the tub.

Diet Day 123 - F-ing Pork

I made these for dinner last night. Garlic parmesan pork meatballs. While I've ruled out beef, and ruled in chicken, pork hasn't made itself an obvious 'yes' or 'no' thus far in my continual arthritis-elimination diet experiment. But I'd been 100% symptom-free for 4 or 5 days straight (no intermittent morning knuckle stiffness even!) so I thought now was as good a time as any to re-test pork where I'd get a clear response, or non-response.

I bought a pound of ground pork from Windy Hill at the farmer's market on Saturday, and thought I'd try making them into meatballs. They're really too simple to be called a recipe, but they were AMAZING, so in case you're interested, here's what I did:

Mix:
1 lb ground pork
1 minced clove garlic
1/2ish cup grated parmesan (maybe less? I didn't measure)
a couple pinches salt
a bunch of black pepper

Heat some olive oil in a skillet.

Roll the meat lightly into golf balls without mashing them up or compacting them too hard.

Plop the meatballs in the olive oil, letting them brown on one side before rotating them around so all sides get brown (tongs!) By the time all the sides of all the meatballs are brown and crispy (a little of the cheese will melt out too and crust up nicely) they should be done inside. Plus all the fat from the pork will render out into the olive oil until they're frying in their own fat. . . mmmmmmm.

I wilted some spinach with garlic, a little heavy cream and parmesan to go with the meatballs. Beautiful, beautiful food.

Until this morning. I felt the stiffness start creeping up in my left hand until by noon it was noticeably sore to bend it back and forth. By 2:00 my range of motion was at about half, and now at 4:30 it's excruciating to move my hand out of a neutral position. Arghh. And there are leftover meatballs in the fridge that I was REALLY looking forward to eating!!

But no. Instead, I am angrily eating marshmallow/coconut fruit salad directly out of the tupperware and hoping my wrist feels better in the next 24 hours. Although, from past flare ups, it'll probably be Wednesday or Thursday before it's back to normal. I miss red meat. Lamb was okay, but it's so freaking expensive. Sigh. Well, if anyone wants my leftover meatballs, they're yours.

Gluten-free Blueberry Muffins

In celebration of my 60th day on my new diet, my fingers decided to be sore this morning with no explanation. Really just my right thumb, but still enough to catch me off guard when I tried to use said thumb to hit snooze at 5am and discovered it wouldn't bend. I didn't eat anything new yesterday, except these really tasty cornmeal/blueberry muffins I'd made the day before (gluten-free!).
I have tested corn a couple times, and am pretty confident it's okay, but I also used some gluten-free Bisquick mix I hadn't tried before, so it's maybe possible something in that threw me off? It's also possible that although my symptoms are pretty much gone, my body still might not be 100% perfect, and little minor flare-ups might have to be okay for now. My hands were fine by the time I got to school, except for a little residual soreness in the one thumb joint, so all in all, hardly a big deal.

And I will put in another plug for the barefoot running. I've been absolutely loving it. I went for a 2 mile run on Sunday after we got a bunch of rain, so I got to run through puddles and mud, which was just SO much more fun than running in shoes. If you wear sneakers and run through puddles, you get squishy wet socks that slosh around for the rest of your run. If you're in your bare feet, you can leave barefooted footprints in the mud and splash as you run. I might have to break down and buy those ridiculous Vibram five-toe foot-condom shoes once it gets to be winter, but for now I can't imagine giving up the feeling of mud and water and grass and asphalt on my feet. I did another two miles yesterday, and cut my time down by a minute without feeling any extra effort (16:30). Running has always been one of those things I had to make myself do because I knew it was good for me. Since I took off my shoes, it's become something I want to do because it feels good.

Here's my recipe for gluten-free muffins that might have made my joints hurt but maybe not (adapted from this one that my aunt sent me - because I couldn't find almond flour). They have the grainy texture of cornbread, but are just sweet enough to be dessert-y.

Blueberry-Cornmeal Muffins (Gluten-free)

4 eggs
1/4 cup water

1 stick melted butter

1 cup Bisquick gluten-free baking mix

1 cup whole-grain corn meal

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup honey

cinnamon (several shakes...a couple teaspoons?)

blueberries (I dumped a bunch in...maybe a cup?)

2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

Pre-heat your oven to 350. Mix the dries, add the wets. Fold in the blueberries last. Taste it, and add more sweetener (either the sugar or honey) if you want. Batter should be pretty thick. Spatula the batter into a 12-muffin tin - you can fill the muffin cups up almost full because they don't rise too crazy much. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the tops are golden brown and a knife inserted into a muffin comes out of the middle clean. Cold pat of butter and a drizzle of honey...

Kale and cabbage gratin! Gluten-free!

I hadn't made very much new or interesting food in a while. I've been eating things like baked chicken legs, and roasted sweet potatoes, and rice pudding. All are wonderful, and have become comforts foods in lieu of Honey Nut Cheerios, or Vienna Fingers, or Chips Ahoy, but they've been starting to get a little boring. I came across a recipe in the NYT the other day though, for a kale and cabbage gratin, and was intrigued. Gratins are one of those dishes that I feel are always being bruited about in my Food & Wine, but I've never quite had a handle on what one was, save that it involved cheese. As the culinary fates would have it, I had just picked up a bag of kale at the farmer's market on Saturday (another plug for Atherton Mill and Market!!) and I had half a head of cabbage left over in the fridge.

So, a gratin it was! The NYT recipe calls for breadcrumbs, which I can't eat right now, and for fresh sage, which I don't have. I thought I'd be safe with thyme (really, who's allergic to thyme) but substituted the dry stuff. And since I hadn't re-tested garlic, I took this as an opportunity to do so. Left out the onion, since I didn't have one, and used cheddar cheese, since I DO have that. Without the breadcrumbs, it's gluten-free. Booyah.

Simplified ingredients looked like this (plus olive oil):
Kale, cabbage, cheddar, 2 eggs, a few cloves of garlic, short-grain (I use arborio) rice, salt, pepper and thyme.

Here's how you make it...

Cook 1/2 to 1/3 cup of arborio rice. I dumped some in the pan, so I don't really know how much I used.

While the rice cooks, saute a few cloves of garlic, sliced, in the olive oil. De-stem the kale (you can just rip the fluffy leaves off the stem - it's not a big pain like de-stemming collards). Add a bunch of kale (I used a fluffy colander-full) and thinly sliced cabbage (I used about 1/3 of a small head) to the pan with the garlic. Let it wilt a little, adding a scant 1/2 cup of water once it's gotten brighter in color and slightly wilty. Let it simmer in the water until the water evaporates...the leaves should be bright green, and pliable/droopy but still firm. Add salt, pepper, and thyme to taste.

Grate the cheese!!!

Beat the two eggs in a bowl.

(I made everything in the skillet, but you can mix it in a bowl and then dump it in a casserole if you wanted.)

Turn the heat off the greens once they're done (droopy, still slightly firm and bright green - not soggy). Stir in the cooked rice. Stir in the cheese. Stir in the eggs last, so they don't cook when they hit the rest of the ingredients (mixing in the cold cheese and cooled-down rice first cools the whole thing down). Taste the mixture and add more salt or pepper if you want.

Bake the whole kit and kaboodle at 375 for 30-40 minutes, or just until the edges turn brown and crispy and the top is firm.


Tada!! I ate two-thirds of the pan.

How to make rice pudding.

Yesterday I was craving something sweet, had run out of grapes, apples and pears, and had already eaten three bananas. I hadn't tested cane sugar yet, but since honey, rice and milk are on the okay list, I decided to make rice pudding. Here's the simple three-ingredient version.

some milk (a little less than 2 cups)
between 1/3 and 1/4 cup of arborio rice
honey!!

Err on the side of less milk, rather than less rice. If it gets thick before the rice is fully cooked, you can just add more milk to the pan.

You can also add a pinch of salt, which make it less cloyingly sweet.

And if you're not into honey's flavor, you can use white sugar instead. Or a little white sugar and a little honey.

And if you aren't presently in the midst of attempting to determine the affect of different foodstuffs on your unexplained rheumatism, you could add vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, raisins, orange zest, or anything else flavory.

Boil the milk and the rice, stirring often to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. It doesn't have to be boiling like crazy, just a nice simmer to keep it cooking. About 15 or 20 minutes. The rice will start to leak starch into the milk and it'll get thicker and creamier, like a risotto. Taste the rice at this point to make sure it's as cooked as you want it - soft and a little chewy.

Once the texture is what you want, stir honey into the rice by the spoonful, tasting as you go. I went crazy and unleashed a good quarter cup into mine the first time - this was a little overly sweet.

The rice pudding in the photo below is done. I only made about half the recipe, which is why it doesn't look like very much. If you want it a little creamier than this, just add more milk.

A bittersweet tale of bread.

Last night I made bread. The plan was to make the bread last night, wake up this morning, evaluate how I felt after two days plain wheat (i.e. without yeast), and then assuming I felt good and with that data safely tucked away, embark on my bread trial. I knew this would mean baking the bread and not eating it immediately, but for some reason I thought that would work. I'm not sure at what point I realized this was NOT going to happen on quite that time line... I think it was when I started eating the bread dough off my fingers.

Because all-purpose and bread flours typically have barley in them (I had never noticed this), and I was trying to control variables by testing only wheat PLUS yeast, I used 100% whole wheat flour. Most bread recipes call for some mix, because 100% whole wheat is heavy and grainy and kind of abrasive. Okay, so I was trying to control variables, but kind of failed. I omitted the molasses called for in the recipe (because I hadn't tested it), but I didn't have enough sunflower oil to substitute for the olive oil, so I went ahead and used the olive oil. It just seems like such a benign ingredient, right? (The recipe as at the bottom of the post.)

So, cheat number one: using olive oil. Cheat number two: the bread looked so damn good there was no way I could not eat it right then while it was hot.

At first I said I wasn't going to put butter on it, since I hadn't tested butter specifically (although I tested milk without any problems). So I poured honey all over it instead. It was incredible.
The bread turned out wonderfully soft and fluffy, although the whole grain graininess of it kind of made my tongue feel a little bit roughed up.

The honey was so good, and the bread was so steamy and hot, that cheat number three just became inevitable: I slathered butter all over it too.

So - poor experimental design, but amazing baked good that tasted like heaven. I was okay with that.

But...this morning the back of my left hand was sore when I woke up. Nothing extreme, and no sign of the infamous lump, but still enough to be noticeable and make me think, "Crap, I guess I cut out wheat again."

If I had WAITED until today to try the bread, and my hand had NOT been sore this morning, and then it had become sore only AFTER the bread, I'd have been able to say "Oh, okay, it was just the yeast" (or olive oil, I guess). However, because I couldn't wait, now I don't know if my hand is sore because of the wheat I'd been eating for two days already, or the bread I ate last night. Or the olive oil. Or, I suppose, the butter (although that seems unlikely as butter is typically less allergenic than milk). Which means that now I have to re-eliminate them all for at least five days before testing any of them again.

So, because the bread test requires you eat it for three meals for one day, I ate bread all today, loved every minute of it, and will see if my hand is still sore tomorrow. But the extra loaf is, tragically, being relegated to the freezer until such time as it seems logical to test it again.

Frustrating, sure, but not so terrible really, as I've learned to eat quite nicely without wheat by now. Still, I'm annoyed at myself for not being more precise and thorough. And there is still the nagging worry that nothing I'm eating is having any effect on anything and I'm tilting at windmills.

What really DID suck was that our TFA group leader tonight made these amazing, gooey, caramel-filled brownies that were still warm when our meeting started. Everyone got up and helped themselves. The bastards got seconds. Every time they peeled back the tinfoil the room smelled like fudgy brownie. And I sat there sipping on my tea and trying not to drool sadly. THAT'S when I think, "Is this completely bogus? Am I controlling my diet as some kind of control-freak proxy for not being able to control my symptoms? Am I going to turn into a crazy(er) hypochondriac who freaks out about everything I eat?"

PLUS the arch of my foot has been sore and a little swollen the past week; I have not been recording it or relating it to my arthritis symptoms because it's done this before when I've worn bad shoes or started running after a long hiatus (both of which I've been doing recently), and it feels like soft-tissue and not a joint. Back in Chicago I had a podiatrist make me custom orthotics for the same issue. But now I'm thinking, "Crap, what if it's somehow related and I've been ignoring it all week and thus have rendered this whole venture quite useless?" Not to mention the more obvious fact that it's aggravating because I'm trying to get back into shape and be able to run a few miles and I'm just getting into a good routine and I don't want to hurt myself MORE by overdoing it.

Sigh. So, I pray that this experience will help me in some way, and that my arthritis will, perhaps, just magically vanish forever, and I'll finish out the next three weeks of food testing and see what happens I guess. I got Dr. Mansfield's book from Amazon finally, and it's helped to reassure me that this whole idea isn't complete hokum. Still, it's a little frustrating to feel like I'm on my own trying to figure out something that might not be figurable.

100% Whole Wheat Bread - Two Loaves

2 3/4 cup hot water (just from the tap)
1/3 cup oil (olive or anything else)
1/3 cup honey
1 TB salt
7 cups whole wheat flour (max - I probably used closer to 6 1/2)
(2 TB molasses - I didn't use it, but it'd probably make it better)
2 TB dry active yeast (this was a little more than two packets)

Put the water, oil, honey, molasses and salt in a bowl and stir to mix. Add 2 cups of flour, and stir to mix. Then add the yeast (two packets, plus a pinch or two, although you could probably get away with just two packets.) Stir to mix in the yeast.

Add another 4 cups of flour. Stir it in until it starts to look like consistently sticky dough. Don't stir any more than you have to to mix it evenly. Add another 1/2 cup of flour and stir it in. Your goal is to use as little additional flour as possible to get the dough to stay in an even ball like dough, and not stick all over the sides of the bowl. I didn't use much more than 6 1/2 cups. Don't mix any more than you have to.

Once your dough looks like dough, cover it with a towel and leave it someplace warm. (I stuck it on top of the stove and pre-heated the oven early - 350). It should rise a lot (almost double) in about 30-40 minutes.

Grease your two bread pans (or one bread pan and a baking sheet for mini-loaves).

Divide up your dough into whatever pieces you're baking - half the dough is one loaf.

You don't really need to knead it, just shape each piece into a nice ball by stretching it back around itself, so all the seams wind up on the bottom of the ball and the top surface is nice and smooth and stretched.

Put the dough in your pans, and let it rise for another 30-40, or until almost doubled.

Bake at 350 for about 35 minutes, or until it's nice and golden brown on top.

When you take it out, you can rub butter over the crust to make it nice and shiny.

Eat it with massive amounts of honey. Or just with butter.

Dreams of carbs....

I was going through my folder of photos and came across some pictures of food I took over Christmas. Food made out of lots of sugar and flour and things I can't eat yet. I'm going to post these photos so that in a month, or a few weeks or whenever I establish I can eat things like this again (hopefully that's what happens, anyway), I can look back at this post and feel especially grateful and inspired.

My dad always makes Norwegian Christmas cookies. These are Smultringer (basically, lard rings). They're little fried donuts.
Although not the best photo, I made this trifle for Christmas dinner. I soaked the ladyfingers in cointreau, and used mandarin oranges, made the custard from scratch and dumped whipped cream on top. And then doused the whole thing in cointreau again. It was amazing, and better the next day after chilling/settling in the fridge.
I've made these cheddar biscuits a bunch of times, and they're always easy and turn out great. The colder you can keep all the ingredients (especially the butter) before mixing and kneading, the better. They're flaky and wonderful and I'd give my firstborn child for one about now.
The recipe is from Ina Garten, here. I never have buttermilk, so I put a little vinegar in milk to substitute and it works just fine.
The last few years, since all the Andersen kids are now adults who don't need to open presents at the crack of dawn, we've enjoyed having a long breakfast on Christmas morning. This year I made sour-cream blueberry muffins (recipe here) and a leek and cheese frittata. We had smoked salmon too, which I love, but the only salmon I can have right now is fresh, which I'm absolutely sick to death of.
Sigh. I do get to eat rice today, although without butter or cheese or black pepper or spices it will be a pretty unexciting affair. Still, it'll be good to eat something truly starchy. I had two bananas for breakfast today, and they've never tasted so good. I've been surprised at how much I've started craving fruit, because it's the only source of sugar I have right now. I dropped eight bucks on a damn sack of grapes and I'll probably eat them all within 48 hours.

Day Three: Oil!!!! (and Sweet Potato Chips)

After a trip to one Harris Teeter and a phone call to another, plus a call to Trader Joe's, I finally found sunflower oil at Berrybrook Farm on East Boulevard. She even had the bottle of oil waiting for me behind the counter. I poked around the store a little bit, and good lord, granola has never looked so good. And the frozen foods! Burritos!! Argh!!

No wonder there are so few published large-scale studies of diets like this one - getting people to stay compliant would be a nightmare.

But the oil really has made everything better. I had no idea how much I was craving fat until I found myself running my finger along the inside of a bowl to lick up sunflower oil as if it were chocolate frosting. It doesn't even really taste like anything; it's just a plain sort of salad oil. But it has made my food infinitely more tasty.

Look! I can roast vegetables! Turnips aren't even so bad when they've got crispy edges and lots of sea salt! (They kind of taste like a big, bland radish.)
And sweet potatoes! I can make chips!!

Sweet Potato Chips

Sweet potatoes
Sunflower oil
Cast iron skillet

Peel sweet potatoes, and slice thinly. I like them a little thick (like in the photo) so they get chewy in the middle.

Heat up the oil in a cast iron skillet or pan. It doesn't need to be very deep - about a quarter inch.
Cook the sliced sweet potatoes in batches, turning them over until they're browned and crispy on both sides. Put a bunch of paper towels on a baking sheet and put the chips on that as they're done. This will let you drain them and keep them warm in the oven while each new batch cooks.

If you do more than one or two medium-sized sweet potatoes, you'll need to add more oil as you go along. Let it get hot again before adding more potatoes.

If you aren't on a wacko diet, you can put salt on them, or cinnamon and sugar.

I marked on my new 2011 calendar which days I reintroduce which foods. First up are avocado and chicken. That's on Thursday. Next day is green beans, grapes and broccoli. But Saturday is what I'm most looking forward to... tomatoes and beef!!

Of course, really I'd rather have one of those things cause some reaction than the more likely culprits: wheat and dairy. But in any event, it'll be good to eat foods that aren't root vegetables again. The grocery store was torture today. There were Ding Dongs by the check out at Harris Teeter. I don't think I've ever even had a Ding Dong, but holy hell did they look good.

My sister likes sweet potatoes a lot (Sweet Potato Latkes)

Today I did very little that was productive. It was great. I slept until 11, which I haven't been able to do in months because my internal clock is set for 5am. I checked on my Amazon order (Appalachian Trail Guide to Tennessee-North Carolina -- more on that plan later). I changed out my oversized men's sweatpants for my cowboy-print flannel pajama pants. I ate Christmas cookies. That was the first half of my day. Very worthwhile.

In the afternoon, I took my car up to the shop for an oil change and walked back home. I went and traipsed around in a field or two briefly as a detour. It's cold and snowy, but it was really nice to get outside and breathe cold air after so many days curled up in the house wearing flannel and eating cookies.

I walked around the Cauffiel House across from the park, and looked at the Delaware River. Across the river, New Jersey looked very cold.


Then I walked back up Philly Pike.
Then when I got home, I made sweet potato latkes (1 grated sweet potato, an egg, some flour, cinnamon). Hannah put maple syrup on hers and liked them a lot. Here's how you make them:

You need:

1 large sweet potato
1 egg
3-4 Tablespoons flour
Cinnamon
Frying oil (sunflower is best, or you can use canola, or mix butter into either)

Grate 1 sweet potato. Put the grated potato into a towel and wring it out to drain some of the excess moisture. Put it back in a bowl, and mix in one egg, and add flour. Add as much cinnamon as looks good to you, and stir it up until it's well-mixed.

Heat the oil in a cast iron skillet, until it's shimmering and hot. (I flick a few drops of water in it - if it sizzles angrily, it's ready.)

Scoop up the potato mixture by the spoonful and drop it into the oil. You can kind of smush it down a little to flatten it. Let it fry for a minute or two on one side, then flip it over and do the other. They're done when both sides look crispy and lightly browned.

Trout! (Pan-fried)

I bought trout at the Atherton Mill Farmers Market last week. It was caught in NC and was sold to me in a ziploc bag. I have never bought or eaten or cooked trout before, but the guy asked what kind of fish I wanted and when I said I didn't know but I wanted something I could fry in a skillet, this is what he handed to me.
First of all, isn't it beautiful? Fish are amazing to me sometimes, with their little sparkly rainbow scales. Like that kids book, right? Almost too pretty to eat. Except...not really.

For all my years as a fish-eating vegetarian, I know approximately one way to cook one kind of fish. I can pan fry salmon. That's it. So I wasn't entirely sure what to do with two whole trout, but I figured if I messed up the first one I'd still have a shot with the second. So I did what I always do when unsure how to cook something...I fried it in buttr!!

Pan-fried Trout

a fish (1 lb seems to be two fishes worth of fillet)
flour
salt and pepper
butter

Rinse the fish, and use a sharp knife to separate the two halves of the body from each other if they're still connected (mine were). Pat dry with a paper towel.

Mix a half-cup or so of flour with salt and pepper on a big plate. Dredge the fish in the flour on both sides.

Melt the butter in a cast iron skillet until it's bubbling, but not starting to brown. Put the fish in the pan, skin side down, and cook for a couple minutes (3? 4?) Flip the fish over with a pair of tongs and fry on the other side. Ideally, you only flip it once. Shouldn't take more than 10 minutes (max!) to cook through. Yum.

Done and done. The result? The absolute best piece of fish I think I have ever eaten. Like, seriously. Not as the result anything fancy I did, but because I swear the little guy must have been swimming around the day before. I'm never buying fish at the grocery story again. I'm absolutely serious. If you're going to eat food, why eat the crap version?

Brown-sugar baked pears

I'm always overwhelmed by the 38 kinds of pears you can buy, so this week I bought one Bosc pear and one Bartlett pear and decided to actually compare them instead of just eating one and thinking, 'Oh, that was alright' and then the next time I go to buy them forgetting what kind I bought the last time. So, last week I baked a Bartlett pear with a brown-sugar/maple syrup/butter glaze. Pretty good, but overly sweet. I thought I'd try again with the Bosc pear. Recipe worked better, but the Bartlett pear I think is better for baking than the Bosc.

This was my breakfast yesterday:

Fry them in butter!!! Once they were browned on the open side, I dumped brown sugar into the butter, melted it all around, spooned it over the pears, and threw them in the oven for 20 minutes. I ate them with cottage cheese, although some kind of biscuit or something would have been better to soak up the syrup. Oh, and check out how resourceful I am. I don't have a melonballer but found that a teaspoon measuring spoon works great for scooping out the cores. Ha!

I'm Irish and I love potatoes.

I'm also Norwegian and I love mugs that have the Lord's Prayer written on them in Norwegian. Thankfully, I can enjoy both.
I've been trying lately to get good at cooking basic things. I've spent the last year or two teaching myself to make things like balsamic reduction glazes and orange-honey popovers and things that aren't like, basic food I'm going to want to eat for dinner most days. So I made chili the other day. And decided to figure out how to make breakfast potatoes today. They turned out fantastic, so in case you're interested:

Easy Breakfast Potatoes

Potatoes (1-2 small white or yellow potatoes per person)
1 TB paprika
1 TB ground black pepper
1-2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp salt
olive oil (a few TBs)

Dice a bunch of potatoes. (That's like, one potato in the photo.)

Boil them for about 5 minutes - just until they're barely tender. While they're boiling, dice some onion and start sauteing that in vegetable oil.

Drain the potatoes and rinse them in cold water.

Mix up the following in a bowl: a bunch of paprika (a big spoon), a bunch of black pepper (another big spoon), some garlic powder (like a teaspoon or so), and some salt (another tsp). Go easy on the salt cause you can always salt when they're in the pan. Add enough olive oil to make a kind of slurry. Then toss your potatoes in the spice/oil until they're coated.

Chuck them into your skillet, which should be hot by now and still have the onions cooking in it. Fry them until they're crispy on the edges! Add whatever extra salt and pepper you want at the end.

Potatoes are best enjoyed while wearing ridiculous bedroom slippers and reading Orion magazine.