Tamale Pie

This week’s Whip It Up theme is “spicy”. Normally when opting for Mexican-inspired dishes, we turn to Mexican lasagna,vegetarian chili, or tex-mex pasta. But Whip It Up calls for new recipes, so Tamale Pie it was!

Tamale Pie

Ingredients:

• 1 pound soy crumbles or ground beef
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 green bell pepper, chopped
• 2 cans diced tomatoes
• 1 can whole kernel corn
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons chili powder
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1 can diced green chilies
• 1 package cornbread mix
• 1 egg
• 1 1/3 cups buttermilk
• 6 tablespoons butter

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400F.
2. In a large skillet over medium heat, brown the beef in oil. Add onion, garlic, and bell pepper, cook for 2 minutes, until just tender. Stir in tomoatoes, corn, and seasonings; simmer for 5 minutes longer. Pour into a 13x9-inch baking pan.
3. Prepare cornbread batter using egg, buttermilk, and butter. Mix drained green chilies into batter. Carefully spoon over top of beef mixture.
4. Bake 15 to 20 minutes until cornbread is lightly brown and filling is bubbling.

Stuffed Peppers

This week’s theme for Whip It Up was “healthy”, so the choice was obvious for me; stuffed vegetables. There is nothing better than a vegetable stuffed with more vegetables (Husband disagrees, which is why I am enjoying cooking just for me lately) and these certainly did not disappoint. Easy, healthy, and delicious!

Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients:

• 4-6 bell peppers
• 1 pound soy crumbles or ground beef
• 2 onions, diced (separated)
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 8 ounces crushed tomatoes
• mexican blend cheese
• 1 ripe tomato, cored and quartered
• 1 jalapeno pepper
• 1 cup long grain white rice
• 1 teaspoon canola oil
• 1 cup vegetable broth
• 1/2 tablespoon tomato paste
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
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Directions:

1. To prepare rice, process tomatoes and onion (1) in food processor until smooth, about 15 seconds. Remove ribs and seeds from jalapeno, mince, and set aside.
2. Heat oil in saute pan with lid. Add rice and fry, stirring frequently, until light golden and translucent, 6 to 8 minutes. Reduce heat to medium, add jalapeno pepper, and stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Stir in pureed tomatoes and onions, vegetable broth, tomato paste and salt; increase heat to medium-high and bring to a boil. Cover pan and transfer to oven; bake at 350 for 30 to 35 minutes, until liquid is absorbed and rice is tender.
3. Cut tops of peppers and remove seeds and ribs from inside pepper.
4. Heat large pan over medium-high heat. Add soy crumbles or ground beef and cook until browned. Add onions, garlic, and crushed tomatoes. Stir occasionally for 5 minutes.
5. Add a small handful of shredded cheese and one to two cups rice mixture (to personal preference) and mix thoroughly.
6. Fill each pepper with the mixture, squashing down to fill as much as possible. Stand upright in a baking dish.
7. Cover with foil and bake at 375 for 15 minutes. Remove foil, top each pepper with more shredded cheese, and bake for an additional 5 minutes.

“Chicken” Pot Pie

This week’s theme for Whip It Up is “regional favorites”.   I was really stumped by this – I’ve been living in D.C. for 8 years now, and I really couldn’t think of a single food that was distinctly D.C. in nature.  Next, I pondered my future home in a few years – Philadelphia.  There are a plethora of foods associated with Philly – cheesesteaks, soft pretzels, cheese whiz, cheesecake, to name a few – but none which I was interested in making (or eating).  Bypassing Philly as well, I thought about my hometown where I grew up – Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

Now, I’d like to point out the flaw to the “Pennsyltucky” theory that Pennsylvania consists of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Kentucky in the middle.  I grew up in the state capital, and I never knew a single person who lived on a farm, had more than a half acre of land surrounding their home, owned any sort of livestock, owned an old beat-up pickup truck, or anything else that would fit into the typical “small town” theme.  In fact, my parents’ own home is so urban, their mailbox hangs on the front door – none of that mailbox on a post at the sidewalk stuff that plagues the suburbs.

But, most of the population fails to recognize Harrisburg as an actual city, and groups it into “Central Pennsylvania”, which typically conjures up images of Amish and the Pennsylvania Dutch.  I have absolutely zero Pennsylvania Dutch in me – both of my parents were born in New York City.  I grew up in a very health-conscious household, so we rarely ate Pennsylvania Dutch type foods which were common in the area, but it’s the closest culinary theme for my hometown region.  I contemplated making my mother’s favorite Central Pennsylvania-related food – traditional Amish whoopie pies – but I am not really one for chocolate.  I considered my father’s favorite Amish delight, shoo-fly pie, but I knew Husband wouldn’t be intrigued by the molasses-based dessert, and since he came down to visit this weekend, I wanted to make something he would eat.  So finally, I settled on chicken pot pie, which I have to confess, I’ve never had before.

Traditional Lancaster-county chicken pot pies are laden with gravy and cream, and not something I would eat, even if I did eat chicken.  So, instead, I lightened it up, and made two separate smaller pot-pies, one with chicken for Husband, and one subbed with portobello mushrooms for me.  I always enjoy rolling out my own dough, but if you wanted to make it even easier, I won’t tell if you buy premade pie dough.  I was really pleasantly surprised with this, and look forward to my leftovers during the week.  Husband, who has only ever had the gravy/cream/lard version before, was disappointed with my lighter version and felt it lacked all the flavor and substance (and calories.. and fat… and cholesterol) of the traditional version.  I guess one of the benefits to being in a long-distance marriage means that I can cook for myself and not for him… so I can make this whenever I want in the future just for me!

Lightened-Up Chicken Pot Pie

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup trans-fat free vegetable shortening
• 2 cups flour
• 1/3 cup cold water
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 tablespoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 2 cups chopped carrots
• 1 cup peas
• 1 cup corn
• 1/2 cup green beans
• 3 cups cubed cooked chicken OR 3 cups chopped portobello mushrooms
• 2 cups vegetable broth

Directions:

1. Cut the shortening into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse ground oats.  Add the cold water and gather the mixture into a ball, flatten, and cut into four equal pieces.  Coat each piece in flour.
2. Roll each quarter of dough out thinly, and place two of the sheets into 2-cup pie pans or mini-casserole dishes.  Let the excess dough overlap over the edges.
3. Melt butter in a large saucepan over medium heat.  Add flour and all the seasonings once butter has started bubbling.  Stir vigorously until the mixture has thickened and fully mixed.
4. Add the milk and broth, bringing the mixture to a boil.  Once boiling, turn off the heat and add the rest of the ingredients, stirring until everything is coated.  Spoon into prepared pie crusts, allowing the filling to heap in the center.
5. Cover each dish with a second sheet of dough, rolling the edges together and tucking on top of the pie.  Brush the top with milk and cut several steam vents in the top.  Cover with foil.
6. Bake 30-40 minutes at 450F.  Remove the foil for the past few minutes of baking to allow the crust to fully brown.

Isn’t It Ironic?

I just happened to notice that my post yesterday on my protein purification woes drew Millipore as an advertising sponsor.  Obviously, this makes sense – I talk protein science, scientists come and read, a life science research biotech company sees a target audience.

But the irony comes in the particular product which Millipore is toting – a 0.5mL centrifugal filter for concentrating or desalting/buffer exchange of proteins.

Have I mentioned that I have literally spent 3 years (do you see a trend in my never-ending, unsolvable research problems) attempting to dialyze imidazole out of Protein X?  And how many Millipore columns I have used?

Millipore, why must you taunt me so?  What’s next, Pierce advertising their Slide-a-Lyzer dialysis cassettes for quick and easy buffer exchange? (I am pretty sure that I am single-handedly keeping Pierce in business with the number of dialysis cassettes I use for all my unsuccessful dialysis attempts.)

New rule: if you advertise something as “delivers great performance”, then you better come to my lab and make it work with MY protein!

Impossibilities

Last week, I had a committee meeting.  In preparation for the meeting, I met with my PI to discuss how to rework my aims, change my hypothesis, and the best way to lay out the “future manuscript” my committee likes to see (i.e., when I acquire data, I will put it into a paper like so).  This lead to a very long discussion in which my PI decided that I had too much chemistry in my project (too MUCH chemistry?  blasphemy!  there is no such thing.) and wanted to try to shift it back to the biochemistry/biophysics side of things.

Now, let’s backtrack a wee bit here.  My second and third years of graduate school were encompassed mostly by failed purification attempts of a fragment of a particular protein which binds to the main protein studied by the lab.  Let’s call this protein fragment Protein Y.  Now, I was not the first person to be assigned the task of purification; rather, a post-doc in the lab and our protein purification lab tech had each sacrificed months of their time in lab attempting to purify Protein Y with no success.  I, however, was not aware of the previous failed attempts, and presuming Protein Y to be like any other protein for which I found a purification strategy, forged ahead with elaborate plans of what to do with said protein, including crosslinking and mass spec to identify the region where Protein Y binds to Protein X, and attempts at co-crystallzation, thinking that perhaps Protein Y would stabilize Protein X enough to form crystals.

I then spent two miserable years trying to purify protein Y, with no success at all.  I certainly do not consider this time to be a waste… rather, I acquired so much knowledge about protein purification and various ways to purify a protein that I have now become the resident protein purification expert.  The chair of biochemistry has informed me that there is quite the demand for biochemist post-docs with expertise in protein purification, so even though the project tanked, I still think it was integral to my future purification success and perhaps even obtaining a future position.

The Protein Y Purification Project never officially closed, but rather, my time was shifted to working on other projects to help get a paper out the door.  I, naively perhaps, assumed that since my thesis aims had shifted to reflect new developments in the lab, and a project which interested me much more (more chemistry! more biophysics!), I was off the hook from my dreaded Protein Y purification days.

Until last week, when I met with my PI.  He wants me to go back to Protein Y purification, and re-visit the crosslinking and co-crystallization ideas.  Nevermind that the lab has now spent 3+ years trying to purify the protein, racking the brains of one post-doc, one protein guru technician, and one very disgruntled graduate student.  I moaned.  I groaned.  And boy, did I complain.  And then, I offered up a perfectly acceptable solution for determining the binding location without having to purify the protein.  My PI thought about this, and agreed that it would be a good alternative… but really, he’d rather just have me purify the protein.  I have no doubt that this has less to do with my own experiments, and more to do with all the things he thinks he could do with a purified protein after I leave… after all, his priority is the future of the lab, and not getting me out the door in a timely fashion.

At my committee meeting, after I presented everything (quite well, according to my PI), the chair of my committee asked what I thought the biggest challenge would be to completing my aims.  Without hesitation, I pointed directly to Protein Y as the source of my likely shortcomings.  The other members of my committee nodded and agreed, after witnessing two years of my failed attempts.  But, never one to be discouraged or accept that perhaps a protein just cannot be purified, my PI immediately jumped up and went through a spiel about how I am a better biochemist now than I was two years ago and how I will certainly have much more success this time.

After just one more week back with Protein Y, I already want to strangle myself.  I wonder how many more years I will have to spend on this before my PI accepts that maybe, just maybe, my research is impossible.

Rigatoni Pie

First off, I apologize that the last several weeks I have only managed to post recipes on the weekends.  I have so many things I want to write… and zero motivation.  Ever since Husband moved away, my motivation has just all gone out the window, and when I get home from lab I just sit on the couch and read or watch TV.  I’m not sure why – honestly, at least this far along it really doesn’t feel like things are that different since I was used to him being on call so much and the rest of my life is exactly the same – but if anyone locates my motivation, send it this way.

This week’s Whip It Up theme is “guilty pleasure” and this recipe has multiple reasons why it fits that category.  For starters, it is pasta based, and I try not to eat a lot of pasta even though I love it.  Second, it’s a recipe that I’ve had bookmarked from Martha Stewart for ages, and crossing a recipe I’ve wanted to try off my list is definitely a pleasure – I love trying new things.  Finally, it involves me being creative with food and taking a very long time to do something that has to do with presentation and not with actually getting dinner on the table – wasting time to do something fun is ABSOLUTELY a guilty pleasure, when I have the lab in the back of my head nagging me 24/7.

Rigatoni Pie
adapted from Martha Stewart

Ingredients:

• 1 pound rigatoni
• 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 1 pound ground beef (I use soy crumbles in lieu of meat)
• 2 garlic cloves, diced
• 1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
• 1 can (28 ounces) crushed tomatoes
• 1 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
• 8 ounces grated mozzarella cheese

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400F.
2. Cook pasta until slightly underdone per directions in a large pot of boiling water.  When done, rinse in cold water and drain again.  Toss pasta with 1 tablespoon of olive oil to coat.
3. Heat remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Add beef/soy crumbles.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until brown (or heated through for soy).  Add garlic, pepper, and salt (to taste).  Cook 2 minutes more.
4. Add crushed tomatoes and simmer until thickened, about 20 minutes.
5. Toss pasta with Parmesan cheese.  Butter a 9-inch springform pan.  Tightly pack pasta into pan, standing each piece on end.
6. Spread 2 cups sauce on top of pasta, poking it into each of the holes (after trying a fork and chopsticks, I suggest the best way is just to use a finger).  Bake 15 minutes, sprinkle mozzarella on top, and return to oven until cheese is golden, 10 to 15 minutes more.
7. Remove from oven and let stand 15 minutes.  Run a knife around the edges to loosen; unmold.  Cut into wedges and serve with remaining sauce.

Patriotic Desserts

I recently joined another food challenge of sorts, Whip It Up.  Each week a topic guideline is given, and I have to prepare a new-to-me recipe and post it.  I’ve already been posting a recipe each week, so this just means that I’ll have to make something NEW, rather than posting from my constantly increasing stash of recipes and food photos waiting to be posted.  I figure that between Whip It Up, Daring Bakers, and Daring Cooks, it will at least guarantee that I’ll be trying 6 new recipes a month, which should help me from losing my touch in the kitchen now that I am no longer living with Husband.  I suspect that, rather than my routine cooking 7 nights a week, I will be resorting to cereal or popcorn for dinner since my hours in the lab are going to increase even more in an effort to finish as quickly as possible.

This week’s theme is “Holiday Food”.  And, given that today is a holiday (and one of my favorites, to boot – I am a huge sucker for a good fireworks show, and living in D.C., I have the best at my doorstep!), I opted to make some appropriately colored desserts for a gathering I am attending pre-fireworks festivities.  (I’m also bringing a triple batch of my spinach and artichoke dip – recipe here, for those who missed it the first time.)

First up, a red, white, and blue colored trifle.  The inspiration for this came from Sandra Lee, but her ‘semi-homemade’ concept is a little too semi for my tastes – if I’m baking, I want to bake.  So, I used my own most favorite devil’s food cake recipe (rather than box mix) and made my own vanilla pudding and mixed it with the CoolWhip (rather than just two tubs of cool whip).   But, if you want to cheat and use premade cake mix, I won’t judge (too harshly). :)  And then, because it sounded like fun, I decided to try my hand at chocolate covered pretzels.

4th of July Trifle

Ingredients (red for cake, blue for pudding):

• 1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 stick butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 3 large eggs, room temperature
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 oz. bittersweet chocolate, melted and cooled
• 1/2 cup buttermilk, room temperature
• 1/2 cup water, warm
• 2/3 cup chocolate chips
• 1 bottle red food coloring (if you want a reddish tint to the cake)
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup all purpose flour
• 3 eggs, separated
• 2 cups milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 (8-ounce) tub frozen whipped topping
• 2 quarts blueberries
• 1 quart strawberries

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.  Grease 9x13 inch cake pan.
2. In a medium bowl, mix together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
3. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugars until light.  Beat in eggs one at a time, followed by vanilla and melted chocolate.
4. Combine buttermilk and water.  Working in two or three additions, alternate adding liquid mixture and flour mixture to the mixing bowl.  Add bottle of food coloring.  Mix just until combined.  Stir in chocolate chips.
5. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Cool cake in pan.
6. To prepare pudding, mix sugar, flour, and salt in top of a double boiler.  Blend in 3 egg yolks and milk.  Cook, uncovered over boiling water, whisking constantly for 10 to 12 minutes or until thickened.  Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.  Cool in refrigerator.
7. Once cool, slowly fold frozen whipped topping into vanilla pudding.
8. Cut cooled cake into 1” squares.
9. To assemble trifle, layer bottom of trifle bowl (or large glass mixing bowl, if your trifle bowl is in storage of your parents’ basement…) with half of the cake squares.  Squish down with hands to form a solid layer.  Spread half the pudding mixture over the cake.  Top pudding with 1 1/2 quarts of the blueberries.  Top the blueberries with the remaining cake squares, followed by the rest of the pudding mixture.  Cut tops off strawberries and place, cut side down, around the perimeter of the bowl.  Pour remaining blueberries into center.

Chocolate Covered Pretzels

These were so simple to make, and so delicious!  Dip pretzel rods in melted modeling chocolate for candy making (I found the Melt ‘n Mold brand at Safeway).  I melted the chocolate in a tall and skinny juice glass, and then tipped the chocolate to the very edge and rolled the pretzel in it.  Lightly scrape the sides of the pretzel on the lip of the glass to remove excess, then sprinkle with desired toppings (sprinkles, nuts, etc.).  Since I was going for a 4th of July theme, I used red, white, and blue colored sugar crystals and piped on frosting, which I tinted red and blue with food coloring (I fear my hand will be blue for days!).  The icing didn’t stick as well to the chocolate as it does to cookies or cakes, so it wound up sliding a bit and looking messy… but… they’re fun, festive, chocolate covered pretzels, and that’s all that counts!