I Believe in Chocolate Pudding

Warning: diet sabotoge coming up. Now you can't say I didn't warn you...

So many of my friends are on exercise regiments and eating plans right now, trying to drink more water and eat fewer calories. While I admire their dedication and encourage them every step of the way, I haven't joined the team. In fact, I feel like I'm the anti-dieter and I need to justify myself a bit.

I don't post recipes for sweets and such just to taunt people. I just don't see them as the antithesis of healthy. In fact, I'd like to point out that dessert is a very important component to health.

I read somewhere about a study conducted to determine different cultural perceptions of food. To summarize the study, the French equated cake with celebration and the Americans equated cake with guilt.

It may seem unpatriotic, but a life of guilt is not one I choose to live.

Here's my niece demonstrating that cake = happy. And I just like to have an excuse to post adorable family kid pics.


NPR has a segment called This I Believe. People write essays stating what they believe, and the good ones are read on the air. I've always liked this segment, so allow me to steal this idea and put my own spin on it.

- I believe in real food. Rice instead of Rice-a-Roni. Fruit instead of fruit snacks. Fresh fish instead of fish sticks. Cheese instead of Cheez Whiz.

- I believe in fat. If I eat Special K and skim milk for breakfast, I'm hungry in an hour. If I eat some granola with apricots, walnuts and a little full-fat yogurt, I'm happy until lunch time. Tastes better, too.

- I believe in less meat, more veggies. Despite being married to a hunter, we eat a lot of meatless meals, or meals where meat is more of a side than a main event. Less steak, more stir fry.

- I believe in dessert. Have a piece, love it, then leave it. If it's not delicious, don't bother.

- I believe in waste not, want not. Between our family, the dog, the bird feeder, and the compost pile, very little food ever sees the trash can around here.

- I believe in the joy of movement. Taking the dog for a walk, gardening, dancing, joyriding on a shiny red Schwinn, lifting babies up for a cuddle - I like the occasional gym workout too, but it's the daily motions of life that shape the person.

- I believe in sharing. Taking freshly baked cookies over to your neighbor's house. Inviting friends to your home for dinner. Eating with people you love whenever you can.

Any beliefs you would like to add? I'd love to hear them! As you think about it, here's a recipe that encompasses many of my beliefs listed above. Why's that, you ask?

- It's simple
- It's delicious
- It uses up milk that passes the sniff test...but probably should be used up soon
- It's best when shared


Chocolate Pudding
Adapted from Cook For Good by Linda Watson

2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
3 Tablespoons cornstarch
Pinch of salt
2 and 1/4 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Whisk together sugar, cocoa, cornstarch, and salt in medium pot so no lumps remain. Add 1 cup of milk and whisk until smooth. Add remaining milk and whisk again. Set pot on medium heat, whisking occasionally at first and then more frequently as it thickens (don't let pudding burn to bottom of the pot). When it starts to bubble, whisk constantly for one minute, then remove from heat. Stir in vanilla. Pour into serving cups or ramekins. Allow to cool a few minutes. Serve warm or cold, storing any completely cooled leftovers in the fridge with plastic wrap on top.

Polenta with Italian Sausage and Spinach Ragu

Don't you love it when you just stumble upon inspiration? When an "a-ha" moment appears out of thin air and the world comes into focus?

This happened to me recently reading one of my new favorite blogs In Praise of Leftovers. Specifically, it happened while reading this post. Go ahead, click on the link and read it. I'll wait.

I hope Sarah doesn't mind me quoting her here, but this is what got me:

“What people eat is not well documented.” ...lots of bloggers make special things to post or they are professional food stylists or bakers. What I really love is knowing what people bring to work for lunch (or what Wyatt had in the school cafeteria), what they have at family potlucks, what they scrounge for late at night.

What do people REALLY eat? The answer to that simple question is so much more interesting than the mountains of food mags, tv shows, and blogs out there. I find myself constantly asking people, "What did you have for dinner last night?" or "What did you eat on vacation?" I guess this blog has been all about trying to capture what we really eat instead of what magazines tells us we should, but her words just summed it up perfectly. Perfectly.

In the spirit of what people really eat, here's what was for dinner tonight. After a long weekend in Minneapolis (Yay Minneapolis!), we had no food in the house. I mean it. Check out the fridge. And the stuff in those Tupperware containers doesn't count, as it should've been tossed by now.

So to the cupboard and freezer I go and what do I spy?

- hubby's homemade Italian venison sausage

- half a bag of frozen spinach

- cornmeal

- can of tomatoes

We can definitely get dinner on the table with this. We can even slap a fancy name on it.

Polenta with Italian Sausage and Spinach Ragu

A simple, humble meal. Polenta is just thick cornmeal mush. I like soft polenta, but if you want it thick enough to cut into chunks, just cook it longer and/or use less water.

For the Ragu:

1 lb. Italian sausage, crumbled

1 medium onion, diced

4 cups spinach, chopped

One 28 oz can whole peeled tomatoes

Fresh or dried Italian herbs (oregano, parsley, basil)

In a large pot, cook sausage and onion until onion is softened and sausage is cooked through. Add tomatoes and herbs, chopping up tomatoes with spoon in the pot. Once tomatoes are broken up, add spinach. Cook a couple more minutes until spinach is wilted and mixture is heated through. Serve over polenta.

For the Polenta:

1 cup cornmeal

4 cups water

1 teaspoon salt

1 Tablespoon butter

Boil water on high heat. Add salt. Put an oven mitt on your hand and grab your whisk. Slowly pour cornmeal into boiling water, stirring constantly with whisk (oven mitt is going to protect your hand from splatters). Turn the heat down to low and continue whisking until thickened, about 5 minutes (don't let polenta burn on bottom of the pot). Remove from heat, add butter, stirring. Pour into serving dish and serve hot.

Redeye (Wedding Schnapps)

There are a lot of great things to do during the summer in North Dakota, but if it's Saturday night, you'll find everyone at wedding receptions. This is especially true in small towns, where everyone goes to the reception, regardless if they were formally invited or not.

Expect to be feeding 400-500 people if you are having a small town ND wedding. That's just how it goes.

Yes, this a snapshot from our wedding. First dance. "Stand By Me." I still love that song.

I guess North Dakota is one of those places where people still get married. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for co-habitation if that's your bag (hey, anything Goldie and Kurt do is cool with me), but in general, Dakotans are still pretty traditional. I mean, legally stores can't even open until noon on Sunday, and the community really really appreciates it when young people commit to each other with formal ceremonies.

Or maybe the community just likes a good party. And no ND wedding reception would be complete without a bottle of redeye.

Redeye is a wedding staple, basically sweetened Everclear. It's a German heritage thing. However, full disclosure, we didn't have it at our wedding reception (*gasp*). I actually had to convince my parents that it would be a bad idea to have redeye at our reception since we already had an open (and free) bar, manned by some great cousins who didn't mind spending an evening playing bartender.

Call me crazy, but passing around a bottle of hard liquor in addition to the bar seemed like a little too much encouragement to get plastered, knowwhatimean?

Just like Italian families all have their own marinara recipe, ND families all have their own redeye recipe. Here is ours, courtesy of my mom, a recent retiree who decided that redeye shouldn't be limited to just weddings and breaks out a bottle while pontooning with friends.

Do all parents go crazy like this in retirement while their offspring become the responsible grown-ups?

I copied it straight from the email she wrote to me. I love my mom.

Redeye (Wedding Schnapps)

Here it is. You'll need 5 or 6 bottles for a full recipe. If you need empty liquor bottles, let me know. I'm sure I can scrounge some up from your brother's closet. :)

2 2-liter bottles 7-Up
1 1-liter bottle Everclear
1/2 bottle, 750 ml, creme de almond

Mix all together slowly. Keep mixing while filling bottles.
Optional: add maraschino cherries.

1/2 recipe: 750 ml Everclear to 1 1/2 bottles 7-Up.

Summer Fruit Milkshake

It's summertime and the livin' is easy...

Isn't that how the song goes?

Well, the livin' is mostly easy around here. I'm a little worked up since my twelve-week maternity leave is almost up and back to the office I go next week, hi ho hi ho. I'm fine with the idea of going back to work, but it's taking my baby boy to daycare for the first time that has me in a tizzy.

I know, parents take their kids to daycare everyday and I just need to relax, but I'm having a hard time with this one. I've been with my little guy everyday of his life thus far and now I just drop him off at someone's house? And I'm supposed to be ok with this?


Maybe it's just the heat getting to me. It's 90-something degrees here this week and we don't have air conditioning. Don't feel too sorry for me, I actually like not having a/c. Without a/c, the contrasts of summer compared to the rest of the year are amped up. Our summertime lifestyle completely changes: what we wear, where we sleep, how we cook, what we eat. My kitchen is minimized to the grill and the blender.

Typically my hubby mans the grill, since he's a prototype male that gets his kicks from fire and meat. Meanwhile, I am the frozen fruit queen. Any slightly overripe fruit goes in a Ziploc and is thrown into the freezer. After a whirl in the blender, my frozen fruit stash turns into smoothies, milkshakes, daquiris, whatever.

But yesterday, tragedy struck. They say everything happens in groups of three.

RIP 6/25/09
1. Farrah Fawcett
2. Michael Jackson
3. My blender

During an experiment with frozen watermelon, my blender went out. I've emailed the blender company, hoping to get a replacement part (just need a new blade assembly, since it's now stripped out), but something tells me that I'll have to bite the bullet and get a new one.

Maybe it's because I'm getting older (although many of you will say almost 30 is NOT older), but I've become disenchanted with new things. I want my blender to last a long time. I want my clothes to last a long time. I want my car to run forever. I want patina in my life. Why must I trade my cellphone in every few years and suffer being laughed at by the cellphone store employee because my phone is "so, like, ancient"? Why is everything being made so you can't fix it yourself anymore? One part of my blender goes out, and I'll probably need to trash it and buy a whole new unit.

Blergh.

On a happier note, today is Friday, meaning Free Chocolate Friday! Mars is giving away coupons for free candy bars, satisfying my peanut M&M habit. Go to http://www.realchocolate.com/ and check it out.

Have frozen fruit and a functioning blender on hand? Try this.

Summer Fruit Milkshake
1/2 cup milk or yogurt
2 scoops vanilla ice cream
1 peach, cut into chunks
5 or 6 frozen strawberries
1 frozen banana

Blend it up, adding more milk as needed to keep the mixture moving. Enjoy!

Baked Rice Pudding with Meringue

It's been over five years since my husband and I went on our first date. And now we're married with the most adorable baby ever (I'm biased), a dog, a mortgage, a garden, a lawn mower...how did it all happen so fast?

Probably because he's the best guy ever (again, I'm biased) and I would've been a fool not to marry him. He cleans the house without being asked, he's willing to clean out the gutters in a rain storm, he sees the best and worse sides of me and still sticks by my side, pregnancy hormones and all.

Did I mention he's a great dad too?

You can actually see our child catching the fishing bug in this photo. Amazing.

So if we've been together for five years, that means that I've been hearing about his grandma's awesome baked rice pudding for at least four of those years.

I love rice pudding, but rice pudding for me either meant stovetop or Kozy Shack. But he insisted that his grandma's was the best. "You know, it's rice pudding, but you bake it in the oven, and it has meringue on top..." I had never heard of such a thing. Of course, his grandma has passed on now and his mom didn't have the recipe, and I didn't find anything similar in my cookbooks. Finally, allrecipes.com came to the rescue.

"This is it. This is exactly it."

I'm not going to lie, this is a pain in the butt to make, with the water bath and making meringue and all. But for my hubby on his first Father's Day, it's totally worth it.

Baked Rice Pudding with Meringue

1 cup water
1/2 cup uncooked white long-grain rice
2 beaten egg yolks
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 pinch salt
2 1/2 cups milk
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup raisins
2 egg whites
1/4 cup white sugar

Place the water and rice into a saucepan, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir, and reduce heat to low. Cover pan, and simmer until all water is absorbed, about 20 minutes. (If you have leftover rice from dinner, just skip this step.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat the egg yolks together with 1/2 cup sugar in a mixing bowl. Add the cornstarch and salt. Continue beating, and gradually pour in the milk. Stir in the cooked rice, lemon juice, and raisins. Pour the rice mixture into a baking dish, and place inside a larger baking pan. Fill the larger pan with water to 1 inch up the sides of the dish containing the rice mixture.

Bake in preheated oven until the pudding is creamy and most of the liquid is absorbed, stirring occasionally. If necessary, add more water to maintain the water level.

Meanwhile, place the egg whites in a mixing bowl and beat until soft peaks form. Continue beating, and gradually add 1/4 cup sugar. Beat until stiff peaks form. Remove the pudding from the oven, leaving it in the larger baking dish. Top pudding with the meringue, swirling with a spoon to create soft peaks. Bake in 400 degree oven until the meringue is golden, 8 to 10 minutes. Serve warm.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp

To all my friends with flooded basements thanks to a week of thunderstorms, my sincere sympathies. Sorry, our wet/dry vac has already been lent out, but you are welcome to come over for dessert and talk about it.

I know. Still on a rhubarb kick. But when I see posts like this on other blogs, I can't resist.

Yes, I made it to bask in its sweet saucy glory. Yes, I put it on ice cream. Yes, I put it on my oatmeal. Yes, I eat it straight from the pan with a spoon. I hope you don't mind if I double-dip.

The original recipe called for four stalks of rhubarb. Are you kidding me? I have three massive rhubarb plants taking over my garden, I need to use more than four stalks. So as always, I adapted. I think the lemon adds a brightness to it all, a lovely discovery for future reference.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

Adapted from Everybody Loves Sandwiches, who adapted it from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from...

1 and 1/2 lbs. rhubarb, sliced

3 c strawberries, quartered (I used a 16 oz. bag of frozen strawberries)

Juice of half a lemon

1/2 c sugar (or enough to coat fruit)

3 T cornstarch

Pinch nutmeg

Pinch cinnamon

Topping

1 c flour

1/2 c oats

1 t baking powder

1 T brown sugar

3 T raw sugar

Zest of one lemon

1/3 c melted butter

1/4 c chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 375F. Add the rhubarb and strawberries to a casserole pan, tossing with the sugar, cornstarch, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Squeeze in lemon juice and stir to combine. Set aside.

In a small bowl combine all the topping ingredients, except walnuts. Stir until clumps form. Use your hands to scatter the topping evenly over the fruit. Sprinkle top with walnuts. Bake for 45 minutes until the topping is golden and the fruit have created a bubbly sauce. Cool slightly and serve with ice cream.