Catching Up: Part 3 of 3

So I mentioned something about balsamic vinegar in my last post. If you were to strike up a conversation about this particular condiment, it likely would not include “ice cream” or “cheese” as items to serve with the vinegar. Before now, I would never have thought that either item would go well with balsamic vinegar. Today, I am a changed woman.

There was a booth at the festival selling various kinds of balsamic vinegar. Now being a good Italian girl, I know the value of a good oil and vinegar, especially to dip fresh bread into or serve on top of a green salad. This is not that kind of vinegar.

First of all, it’s much thicker. Regular vinegar is akin to water in fluidity and texture (though not taste of course). This type is more like runny syrup. Second, this vinegar has been aged—and I don’t think the average vinegar is aged much. Third, this vinegar has added flavors from things that have been added to it, like raspberries or black currents. This creates a wonderfully flavorful, sweet (but not too sugary), and tangy food that now has so much more flexibility with foods and flavors it can be paired with. I’ve already snacked on some with bread and brie, and the combination was really good!

Being the food lover and cook that I am, the vinegar has inspired me to create a meal around the two types I bought (which were the raspberry and vanilla fig). I’ve already figured out how many courses I will have (five), each of which will include one of the two vinegars in some way. Mom, if you’re reading this (which I know you will at some point), you and Papa will be coming over to share this experimentation in the culinary arts.

And since I have a lot of catching-up to do in regards to recipes as well, I will finish this post with two recipes, a dinner and dessert if you will. We’ll start off with the main part of the meal: beef stroganoff.

I know that I have posted a beef stroganoff recipe before, but what makes this one different is that it’s “low-fat.” It can be made on the stove or in a slow-cooker, and it doesn’t sacrifice flavor in its effort to be more healthy. The original recipe comes from Fix It and Forget-It Lightly.

What you’ll need:
1 ½ lbs. round steak
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. salt
½ tsp. fresh ground black pepper
1 lb. fresh mushrooms
1 can 98% fat-free cream of mushroom soup
1 c. water
1 c. fat-free sour cream

What you’ll need to do:
1. Cut the steak into strips about 1 inch long and approximately half an inch wide.
2. In a skillet over medium-high heat, brown the meat on all sides. Add the onion and garlic. Cook until the onion is softened, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the mushrooms and add the salt and pepper. Cook for another 3 to 5 minutes.
3. Mix the soup and water together. Turn the heat down to medium-low and add the soup mixture to the skillet. Cover and cook until mixture simmers, about 15 minutes.
4. Add the sour cream and cook for a few more minutes until heated through. Remove from heat and serve.

To use a slow cooker, put all the ingredients except the sour cream into the slow cooker and cook on low for 6-8 hours. Add the sour cream at the very end and cook on high until it's heated through. This is a good recipe to serve over egg noodles or rice. For those who are interested, this recipe is only 7g of fat per serving (six servings total).

Once you’ve filled up on beef stroganoff, you can top it off with dessert: easy sticky buns. I caught this recipe on an episode of The Barefoot Contessa. I ended up substituting half of the light brown sugar with dark brown (because I unexpected ran out of the light), and the flavor was still really good. My only warning would be to eat these as soon as they are cool enough to handle—they don’t taste as good if they’ve cooled and been reheated. The original recipe can be found here.

What you’ll need:
12 Tbs. unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/3 c. brown sugar (I did half light, half dark brown)
½ c. pecans, chopped in very large pieces
1 pkg. frozen puffy pastry, defrosted*
2 Tbs. unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/3 c. light brown sugar
1/3 c. dark brown sugar
3 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 c. raisins

What you’ll need to do:
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put a 12-cup muffin tin onto a baking sheet. This will keep any melted butter and sugar from spilling and dirtying your oven (I know this from personal experience).
2. In a medium mixing bowl, add the 12 Tbs. of butter with the 1/3 c. mixed brown sugar and mix until thoroughly combined. Distribute evenly into the 12 cups of the muffin tin. Add the pecans to each cup on top of the sugar and butter mixture.
3. Lightly flour a wooden board and unfold 1 of the puff pastry sheets. The folds should be going left to right. Brush the sheet with the melted butter. Sprinkle half of the 1/3 c. light brown sugar over the sheet while leaving a 1-inch border at the ends. Repeat with half of the 1/3 c. dark brown sugar. Sprinkle 1 ½ tsp. of the cinnamon and ½ c. of the raisins.
4. Start with the end closest to you and roll up the pastry like a jelly roll. End with the seam side facing down. Trim about ½ inch from each end of the roll and discard. Slice the roll into six equal pieces.
5. Put each slice with the spiral side up into half of the prepared muffin cups. Press gently on the top.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 with the second sheet of pastry.
7. Put in the oven and bake for 30 minutes or until the buns are golden brown on the top and firm to the touch. Cool slightly (only enough to handle them), then scoop each out of the muffin tins and flip them over so the pecans are on the top. Serve warm!

*Do not let the puff pastry defrost up to room temperature. This will make the dough stick together and it will be a hassle to separate. I would recommend putting the frozen puff pastry into the fridge the day before to defrost but keep cold—this should allow it to keep its shape and not stick together.

Enjoy!

Catching Up: Part 2 of 3

Now I feel like I should talk about this weekend. Scooter and I have escaped to the coast, and it comes at a time when I’m in desperate need of a break. Work and school have been steadily wearing me down, like a rivulet of water slowly eroding exposed rock. We came up with the full intention of doing nothing but cooking good food, making an adult beverage, and soaking in the hot tub. Science has shown that such a prescription is exactly what you need to cure insomnia, lift depression, regain vitality, and even improve appetite. Well not really, but it does help me feel like I can finish this semester, and I do have a lot of fun being up here.

So, we drove to the coast. I’m lucky enough to have family with a vacation house in a coastal town that I’ve known since early childhood. I actually have baby pictures of my first steps here in the house where I’m writing this post, and my first impression of the sandy beaches of the harbor. The house is a little different from the memories that I have of summers spent here; but it still has a bed in the loft where I sleep just like I did years ago, and it still smells the same. The view from the front windows is beautiful. I have a straight view up the channel of the harbor that leads out to the larger bay and ocean waters. Right now, the tide is low—I can see the mud exposed from the areas of shallow waters. In really low tides, the whole harbor will lay bare and only the channel will have water.

I couldn’t describe the weather as anything less than perfect. It’s been a perfectly clear blue sky all day yesterday and today—a rarity even in the summer. Usually fog rolls in each morning and evening, but for whatever reason, the sun has shone uninterrupted since we arrived yesterday morning. The birds have been very active too. Since spring is in full force, birds are nesting everywhere. Yesterday, I saw a bird building its nest in the cavity of a wooden pillar along one of the piers around the harbor. I seem to also have a scrub jay visiting the deck every few minutes to pick at the seed I put in the feeder. He’s out there right now, bobbing his head as he grabs food to fill his crop, looking around him for predators every few seconds. Ah, there he goes, flying away to whatever nest he may be keeping nearby.

This weekend also hails an annual festival that Scooter and I went to earlier. So many booths full of homemade goods—flatware, clothing, woodwork, stonework, jewelry (lots of jewelry!), and even llama-fur woven items. Five llamas from local farms were there with their owners, some of whom were spinning the shaved fur for the public to see. There was also some excellent fish and chips, with fish that had to have been fresh-caught this morning, mere hours before it was cooked and served for us. Scooter and I definitely got our fill of trinkets; I came home with a canvas bag made with a heron on the front, a wooden clock carved into the shape of a dragon, an amethyst necklace, and balsamic vinegar (more about that in my next post).

Then we had a tough afternoon—we had to come home, fix a plate of snacks and soak in the hot tub. Then I sunbathed on the deck for a little while as I read. I had to come in sooner than I would have liked because we didn’t have sunscreen. Like I said, a tough afternoon.

Just what the doctor ordered.

Catching Up: Part 1 of 3?

There’s a lot to right about. This weekend, food, and a webinar I attended are only some of the topics I wish to cover today. So to accommodate all the information, I will be posting a few times today. Here is the first.

The webinar that I attended was one for librarians regarding serving a physical and digital population of patrons. In this day and age when so many services are being offered both in-person and online, I think it's important to see what libraries (in the case of this webinar, academic libraries) are providing to their local and distant patrons, and how equivalent services are being offered and conducted for both groups. For schools that offer distance education, I can see how valuable equivalent services become for DE students. From the standpoint of a librarian, I would want to ensure that students are getting the best and most helpful and relevant services available. From the standpoint of a student (and being a DE student myself), I want to know that I can get the resources and services that I need to successfully complete my program. DE students should never feel short-changed because they are not located on or near their school’s campus.
One of the panelists who presented at the webinar offered a lot of suggestions that I really liked and would like to implement at the school I currently work at. Things like online tutorials for database searching, using the school library’s OPAC (in layman’s terms: online catalog), even things like working out math problems or a specific objective from one of our programs—done by an instructor of course—would be very helpful both for our on-campus students and our students currently taking online classes. I could get really creative and even do virtual tours of the library, showing where everything is located and how to find physical materials. One thing about our library’s website is that it has a lot of text—not overwhelmingly so, but enough that upon reflection I realize many of our students would not find it attractive. So in order to make it attractive to our students, I’ll need to add more in the way of other mediums to get our information to them.

Another panelist talked about a number of “untraditional” projects that the library on his campus sponsored. This did two thing: effectively got the name and presence of the library out to the students on campus, and created things that student want and continuously use. A few examples: a piranha tank with a live piranha donated by a student, a Frisbee golf course, a skateboard half-pipe, and a music recording studio. These were all projects that fit that population of students well, they add a new dimension to the campus’s student life, and they really made the library known around campus. While these projects would not be possible at my school, they do open the door to more creativity that what is “normally” found in a library. Plus, it gives me inspiration for projects that the student leadership team could develop and initiate, with the help of the campus library of course.

There were a lot of helpful ideas and advice given by the panelists of this webinar. One goal I’m setting for myself is to come up with my own creative contribution to the school that can inspire students and possibly help spread the name of the library. This summer would be the perfect time to get started.