Kara & Michael’s Blog

Michael and I spent the evening yesterday cleaning out the kitchen, doing laundry and taking out trash. My personal cleaning project was the fridge. I discovered some moldy cucumbers in our crisper and the liquid on my fingers made me decide to clean out our crisper drawers and clean the shelves in the fridge. It [...]

If you’re smart, you plan out your meals for the week, hit the store once or twice and cook what you set out for yourself. It’s cheaper, less time-consuming, keeps you from eating out on-the-fly (which gets expensive very quickly).
Of course, no amount of planning can take every little thing into consideration. Sometimes, you have [...]

In this week’s box:

5 Zucchini
3 Cucumbers
2 tomatoes
6 ears corn
1 yellow onion
Spring mix
Beets
2 peaches
Green beans

I think that’s it, although surely Michael will correct me if I’m wrong. A coworker brought in a lemon cucumber from his garden yesterday, which is positively darling. I managed to take it home since everyone else was weirded out by it, [...]

Last night I made Flounder Florentine – using whiting instead of flounder and using collards instead of spinach. I thought I’d explain it because it was pretty simple and Michael said it was good.
To start, I boiled water with a vegetable bouillon cube. You could certainly use meat stock if you choose. Then I rinsed [...]

Kara just wrote about what we got in our CSA this week, so I thought I’d list the meals we came up with to use up that produce. We’ll eat most of these two nights, or for dinner and then for lunch on a subsequent day, because the 700-750 calories we eat for dinner just [...]

Bought a papaya on sale this Sunday with no particular plans in mind. I made this last night and tasted it this morning, and I think it’s a winner. Props to Kara for suggesting I freeze the papaya.
Ingredients
1 medium ripe papaya (1 1/2 to 2 pounds)
1/2 cup frozen raspberries
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, simple syrup, [...]

This recipe is, by no means, a true tiramisu.  What it lacks in richness and tradition, though, it makes up for in ease.  Michael and I dreamed this up when I picked up mascarpone, berries and hard lady fingers.  I use Ferrara brand Crisp Savoiardi (these) for the lady fingers and find them at Shoppers Food.  I [...]

Michael picked up an acorn squash a couple weeks ago and has been threatening to bake it with butter and cinnamon sugar for a while.  I was mostly worried if such a thing should occur because I expected the results would be… disappointing.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I normally love squash, but most of [...]

I’m posting my recipe for chili, because I’ve been looking around the web and have found that people have some really strange ideas about chili. Honestly, I kind of expected that everybody that made chili without meat would do it pretty much the same way, but this is not the case. People put all kinds [...]

I really enjoy pretzels. They’re not quite junk food, but they’re not quite real food either, and a big soft pretzel makes a great breakfast. I made a batch of “authentic” Bavarian soft pretzels last night to a recipe I found online, and they turned out pretty lousy. There were a lot of things wrong [...]