eclaire (what's in a) name?

unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past several months, i’m sure you’re all quite aware of the economic crisis facing our country.  while mike and i are lucky enough to remain in our excellent places of employment, and the majority of our friends are still working and not impacted by the tough times, it has brought up a new awareness for me about finances.  now, mike and i are no financial gurus, but we’ve been using the website mint.com to set budgets and watch where we’re spending our hard earned money.  it’s been eye opening to see how much of our money goes directly to food.  and while this amount spent on food isn’t exorbitant, there are definitely a lot of take out sushi expenditures, and we often throw uneaten produce into the worm compost bin.

recently, a good friend sent me an article from cnn.com with ideas for $10 meals and challenged me to “better and more vegetarian friendly version.”  so i am responding to the challenge with my own twist on saving money in the food realm, because i got frustrated quantifying how much money i spent on a specific meal, mostly since i pull lots of ingredients from my stocked cupboard (spices, flours, bouillon cubes, canned beans, etc).  let’s just say this post was inspired by the article above, but does not direct speak to it…and i promise to hone my pricing skills and get back to you.

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do you know about the amazing-ness of quinoa?  i learned about it a few years ago, and quickly became obsessed with quinoa because it is super quick to cook, has a very satisfying texture and taste, and is a complete protein (i.e. it contains all of the essential amino acids, something that can be challenging to find in one food item for vegetarians/vegans).  if you clicked on the link above and read the wikipedia page on quinoa, you’d know that part of what makes quinoa so special is that it’s a faux grain – it’s actually a seed.

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hello, dear readers! my fabulous cuz sent me this link about the slow food movement and i thought i’d share it with all of you.  have you heard of the movement?  what do you think about it?  what do you think about this article?  does the slow food movement make sense in our current global economic times?

while i agree with most of the article’s points, what really made me think was the statement: “We’re all full of gastronomy, recipes etc. Turn on a TV anywhere in the world and you will see an idiot with a spoon. And every newspaper and magazine has recipes and a photo of the dish taken from above like a cadaver…We must normalise food rather than put it on a pedestal far out of reach.” ok, so i am most certainly full of recipes, i may just be another “idiot” with a spoon, and i definitely take tons of pics of food, but my goal with this blog is to share with all of you how much fun i have cooking with seasonal and simple ingredients. i also try to convey my personal belief in the importance of enjoying the process of taking care of yourself by making healthy and delicious meals instead of eating calorie laden and nutrient deficient fast foods.  so stay tuned for many, many more recipes!

you may have noticed that posts have been a little further apart than usual around here lately, and i sincerely apologize. i’ve been spending most of my computer time obsessing over the new features in apple’s iLife ’09, and to be even more specific, i’ve been consumed with the faces feature in iPhoto. this new feature goes through your iPhoto library (mine dates back to ’01 with a few scanned pics from earlier years) and identifies the faces in all the photos using fancy face detection software. next, you provide a name to go with the faces of your friends and family members (i used my wedding photos for this because they contain just about everyone we know). after that, the program starts to get scary smart and suggests other photos that might contain these people as well. the program isn’t foolproof, though, and this led to me revisiting every single photo on my computer to correctly identify every single face.

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there are some cookbooks, like the one i used to make butternut squash risotto, that i go back to over and over, finding new and delicious recipes every time.  there are other cookbooks, however, that despite enticingly written concoctions, never quite carry through.  sadly, mike and i bought a cookbook like this years ago, entitled the student’s vegetarian cookbook: quick, easy, cheap, and tasty vegetarian recipes, by carole raymond. quite a title, huh?  we bought it when we were still students, and i can still remember spending an afternoon in the local bookstore, pouring over all kinds of cookbook options, before finally deciding that this cookbook had the most recipes that we would actually make.  unfortunately, every recipe we made was kind of a dud, and we stopped using the cookbook.  except for this one recipe, called sunday morning muffins.  the recipe was not perfect by any means, but i’ve reworked it a ton over the years (see all my edits below!), and i think it’s finally ready to share with you.

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