We got some new Fiestaware for our wedding shower at school!

Orange plates and bowls, deep blue and orange bowls, and a beautiful blue pitcher.


Here's a picture of our first meal with them. Pasta with cherry tomatoes and fresh basil. Thanks everyone!

Not as good as the first time we did it (with pasta btw) but this looks like a new kick for our fooding.

Onions, eggplant, tofu, bell pepper, mushroom, and pineapple.

The text on this bag of bread reads:

"Vegetarian Friendly". A little below that is "Perfect for Turkey Sandwiches!"

I forgot about how Blogger reverses the order of your pictures, so they're in pretty much backwards chronological order of the way they were baked. (Of course, if this were Mac OS X software I could just drag the pictures around. Damn Windows...and Google while I'm at it.)

Ok, this was the whole spread. There are no surprises anymore. But c'mon, that's a lot, right!

Chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips.

This was a double chocolate bar with peppermints...didn't work out. These babies stuck to the pan like it was a mama bear and they were cubs. No dice.

Pound cake.

Less awesome photo. They were great, and didn't last very long.

Oh, my contribution? .... The kitchen was clean when we were done. Enough said.

These are called Blondies: brownies without the chocolate. Butterscotch chips were a last minute audible for Heath bars (we couldn't find any..) and they turned out amazing. Except for the appearance. They didn't really look right. So we ate the whole thing!

Coffee cake

This our counter after we got home from the store. Oh boy.

Miss Bee got a new toy.

I guess we didn't get a photo of the oatmeal cookies with Craisins...those were good too.

These were for Miss Bee's first grade team members. The rest went to the office staff and the rest of the faculty. It took a few hours, but it was worth it.

All recipes came from the Mark Bittman book "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian".

In honor of the 1-year anniversary of receiving this piece of yellow fabric from Miss Bee's friend's mother, we have finally put it to use, framing the entry way to the kitchen. We also managed to finally hang up the fruit basket we picked up at the "refused by Walgreens and Target" store - it only took $1.48 and about 20 minutes at Home Depot to pick the right screw.

Other questions about decor must be submitted in writing.

In the basket we've got some lovely avocadoes, pears, bananas, and apples (Braeburn and Honey Crisp).

Also available as a salad with pine nuts and Goddess dressing.

This is a recipe we've been using a lot of recently. Perhaps some of you remember the gigantic Rosarita's Refried Beans can we got a while ago and posted a picture here. We've been getting those every so often - the beans are really good, it's a super-easy meal, and the cans are quite useful. We also posted - about a year ago - the 20-lb. bag of Basmati rice we got at Costco. We finally finished it today, as Miss Bee made some terrific Spanish rice with just diced tomatoes, garlic powder, dried cilantro and lemon juice. Other awesome ingredients at ridiculous prices - all from Costco - include a one-pound clamshell of spring mix greens, five avocadoes for the supermarket price of two, and 12 cans of diced tomatoes.

They all found their way into this terrific meal that Miss Bee whipped up today. It's pretty much the same thing we've been eating on and off for months: a tortilla with rice and beans at its core, and a rotating cast of characters including avocado, tomato, mushroom, various cheese, sometimes with chips. I thought this one was pretty, with the greens and avocado on top and the hint of red from the Spanish rice below. Great job on the rice, Miss Bee!

Been a hot minute since we had a good food post here, so I'll go two for one. First up was Miss Bee's contribution to Friday morning staff breakfast on the first week of school. She made whole wheat flour blueberry biscotti. I made some organic Ethiopian coffee to go along - the full 12-cupper!

The biscuits turned out really amazing.


Next was another Miss Bee creation: Belgian endives with quinoa, helped out by lots of spinach and Cheddar cheese. Lots of photos.

First the endives were sauteed a bit to soften them up.


Then the whole mess was baked for a while.


I'm not sure that any of these photos make the food look as delicious as it tasted. So you'll have to take my word.

In an effort to clear the Inbox on my desktop along with a desire to prove that we do in fact leave the house, here are a few pictures of us hanging out in public places.

At Papago Brewing Company:


With our recently departed-to-grad school in Colorado friend Alex:

Back to Papago, where we mingle with other patrons, brawnily belt out drinking songs, get into the occasional dust-up, and of course do the crossword puzzle.


This was at Rosie McGaffrey's Irish Pub, where the sign above the door said "Best Fish n' Chips in Phoenix". I had to know, so I got them. It's not true.

Beautiful photo, I'm aware.

Classroom pictures to come. I never remember to take any.

Do you know?

I thought Miss Bee had blogged once about watching Super Size Me but I guess not. Well, we did. And it was intense. We don't eat fast food anyways, but we had been known to indulge in the occasional Dr. Pepper. Since the movie, neither of us has had a soda - it's a terribly sugary substance that has no redeeming nutritional benefits. When I came across the page about what it does to your body I thought I better pass it along to anyone who cares.

By the way, most recommendations for kicking soda are along the lines of: lemonade, ice tea, lemonade with ice tea (Arnold Palmer), sparkling water with citrus, etc. Just stay away from the high fructose corn syrup whatever you do.

Poised and ready.
The olive oil is in that device in order to sprinkle it over phyllo dough more evenly. It doesn't work that well. Case in point.

This is the first spinach pie we tried.

It tastes so good, and it's so damn easy to make.

Fry up some garlic in hot oil, add some chopped pine nuts. Wilt a ton of spinach, like a pound. Or more. Once there's some room in the wok, take it off the heat and add a bunch of feta cheese. Like the whole carton. Let that warm up. Put a few pieces of phyllo on the bottom of a pan, any pan. Oil them up. Toss in the spinach and cheese. Eat several bites of the spinach because it's delicious. Top the pan with four or so more pieces of phyllo. Layer if that's your thing. You're looking at 35-40 minutes at 350 degrees, until the phyllo is brown and crispy on top.

We also love Brussels sprouts. Talk about a bad reputation; these things are great. Steamed is nice, boiled a joy. Lately we've been searing them in a pan cut in half, they really soak up the garlic, then broiled for a few minutes. Not long, repeat, not long. Twelve minutes is too long.

Here they are with some garbanzo beans that cooked in the wok after the sprouts were done and in the oven. Two birds with one stone.


Egg salad: this was a Miss B. creation, I know nothing really, other than she made the mayo and that it was vegan. The mayo, that is. Obviously egg salad is going to have an inherent veganism problem.
In other great news, we went to our friend Alex's mom's house for Easter. We went home with five bags of lemons among the three of us, freshly picked off her lemon tree. That night we went to Alex's and juiced a ton of them. This is not all of the juice we got.

Miss B. and I took home about a gallon of lemon juice and more zest than one recipe is going to be calling for. Alex's mom's lemonade is famous, and simple: equal parts lemon juice and sugar, 8 parts water. So we have approximately 16 gallon capacity right now.

One time, Alex made pretzels.

This photo is a great computer desktop.

This picture was supposed to be with the spanikopita but I hate the blogger picture interface and don't feel like messing with it.

But that's a wok-full of spinach, huh?

In the rice cooker, I steamed the broccoli, red pepper, and bok choy. I also sauteed some spinach with garlic and oil, salt and pepper, basil and pine nuts for an addition of something tasty. Tossing the vegetables into the wok for the last couple of minutes was a good idea, so they got a little seasoning as well. Leslie's dish also included red pepper flakes, mine had a dried cheese dusting.

Look out for egg salad coming soon; parent-teacher conferences could put the kitchen on hiatus for the next few days.

Me in the kitchen, washin' up some dishes.

Baby cauliflower. Cute, right?

Add purple broccoli.

Add a Miss B:

And that would be three pictures taken at AJ's Fine Foods produce aisle.

Here's what came of the trip:

Sauteed chickpeas with salt and pepper and a little cumin. The Brussels Sprouts were absolutely delicious; sauteed with garlic and oil and baked face down for 20 min. or so.

Baking!

A lovely plate of butter cookies with Hershey's kisses.

Frying!
These were spiced chickpeas (featuring turmeric) with wilted spinach. The recipe called for lots of coriander; we used none. Some onion and garlic with sun-dried tomatoes, served with rice and pita chips.

Dried blueberry-ricotta cheese muffins:


They sort of came out like biscuits, which is perfectly fine. They taste wonderful!

I'm unclear as to why this photo is vertically oriented, but I'm too lazy to do anything about it, as we're listening to Eddie Izzard and he's funnier than I am perfectionist.