Obsessed with Martha Stewart

January Overview...28 recipes!

As January comes to an end, I’ve compiled a list of all the recipes I’ve completed this month. I’m really proud of myself, because I cooked/baked/stir-fried/blended/juiced 28 recipes….I’m going to try to top this number in February, so keep checking in on a regular basis. I also participated in a Body + Soul Challenge (which I'm still doing) and a 4 day detox.

 

Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook (5 recipes):

 

Baking Powder Biscuits

Pumpkin Bread

Classic Crumb Cake

Spicy Cheese Biscuits

Blueberry Muffins

 

Everyday Food (14 recipes):

 

Spicy Sausage, Bean, and Cheese Nachos

Pasta with Roasted Vegetable and Spinach

Turkey Sausage Sandwiches

Chicken and Rice Soup with Lemon

Pork Tenderloin with Swiss Chard and Polenta

Beef Rolls with Spring Salad

Polenta Wedges with Asparagus and Mushrooms

Healthy Morning Muffins

Fresh Orange Yogurt Tart (Attempt 1 and Attempt 2)

Black-Bean and Brown-Rice Cakes

Cauliflower Gratin

Portobello, Broccoli, and Red Pepper Melts

Salmon with Green Beans and Lemon Zest

Stir-Fried Honey-Ginger Chicken with Peppers

 

Body + Soul/Whole Living (7 recipes):

 

Mango Smoothie

Green Juice

Carrot, Beet, Cabbage, and Watercress Juice

Chilled Cucumber Soup

Fennel/Apple Juice

Energy Smoothie

Stir-Fried Vegetables and Chicken with Buckwheat Noodles

Steamed Salmon with Fresh Herbs and Fennel

 

Martha Stewart Website (1 recipe):

 

John Legend’s Macaroni and Cheese

 

Martha Stewart’s Cookies (1 recipe):

Ginger Cheesecake Bars
 

Spicy Cheese Biscuits and Blueberry Muffins

Spicy Cheese Biscuits

Thursday morning I woke up extra early to bake spicy cheese biscuits from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. I made my morning green juice just like Martha does and went to work making biscuits, so my husband could enjoy some before work. They weren’t very difficult to make. My favorite part about them was I didn’t have to roll out the dough like the first biscuit recipe in the book.

I was a little disappointed when I tasted them, because I thought that they would taste spicy and cheesy…I mean the recipe is spicy cheese biscuits. They lacked flavor. My husband and I decided that they would need a slice of sausage and another slice of cheese to be mouth-watering. I forgot to take a picture before I rushed my husband off to work with a bag containing the rest of the biscuits.

Blueberry Muffins

This morning I woke up to a world of white. It snowed last night and was continuing to snow when we got out of bed at 6:00 a.m. due to our puppies chirping like little birds. When they whine, it seriously sounds like birds chirping. The puppies love the snow. They play and wrestle in it until they get too cold, and it’s really adorable. I wish I could find my video camera, because it’s just one of those moments that makes you smile.

Anyway, I was thankful that I had already gotten the ingredients to make blueberry muffins (from scratch, not the box kind) from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. I made green juice again and then baked the muffins. I hate when Martha instructs that you have to generously butter the muffin pan and then dust it with flour. I haven’t been able to come up with an easy or logical way to do this, so it gets really messy. Once I got that part out of the way, they were simple to make.

My husband declared that he helped with this recipe and wanted some credit. He didn’t “really” help. This is what he did: got out the ingredients (but he didn’t measure them – I did), cleaned the paddle attachment of the mixer because I asked him to (It wasn’t clean when he handed it to me. It still had globs of muck on it from the last time I used it. I re-cleaned it.), measured out the milk (this was the only thing he measured), and tried to dry off the blueberries (I had to rinse them, because we had to use frozen) with a paper towel (it didn’t work). So here I am giving him credit for the tiny contributions he made to the muffins.  

It was really nice to eat warm blueberry muffins while watching the snow fall. It would have been pretty romantic if our 2 year old lab mix didn’t insist on sitting between us. The worst part is she has really awful gas at the most inopportune times…

Stir-Fried Honey-Ginger Chicken with Peppers

 
On Wednesday night I made stir-fried honey-ginger chicken with peppers from the January/February 2010 edition of Everyday Food. While I was cooking it, my husband and I both thought it was going to be too sweet, because it smelled really sweet. However, we both loved it. It was better than a lot take-out Chinese dishes and at 402 calories a serving, it was much more figure-friendly. I’ll definitely be adding this one to my “must make again” recipe pile.

Body and Soul Challenge Update

I’m currently on week 3 of the Body + Soul Challenge, but honestly, I’ve lost a lot my motivation to keep going. I’m supposed to be doing the following:

• Shunning saturated fats
• Satisfying my sweet tooth with fruit
• Curbing salt cravings by using herbs and spices
• Surviving a midafternoon slump without coffee or soda
• Opting for stir-frying and steaming cooking methods
• Rating my hunger before, during and after each meal
• Slowing down while eating
• Sitting at a table and turning my attention to my food
• Pumping iron
• Doing more physical activity
• Meditating for 15 minutes a day
• Journaling

I’m doing pretty good with all the food goals, except that I’ve been eating coffee cake for breakfast for the past three days. You can’t make coffee cake and not eat it. That’s just stupid {and torturous}. I can’t just drop all my baking goals for this challenge. I’ve been making smoothies or green juice each morning just like Martha and it definitely helps to keep me full and energized during the morning. I don’t drink coffee and unfortunately I gave up drinking soda at the end of August {I miss it, especially when I’m walking down the soda aisle in the grocery store}. Here’s a scary fact – before the end of August when I decided diet sodas weren’t good for me, I hadn’t gone a day without soda since I was in elementary school. When I was a kid, I refused to drink water, even when I was sick. I would only drink Kool-Aid, juice and soda. That is thousands and thousands of days where I drank soda. I wonder what my insides look like.

I didn’t even try to rate my hunger or sit at a table to turn my attention to my food. I could have been rating my hunger, but I forgot. I do have other things going on in my life besides a Body and Soul Challenge. And I’m not prioritizing sitting at a dining room table until 1) I get a dining room table and 2) I have kids. Martha’s just going to have to deal with this, because if I didn’t eat in front of the television, I wouldn’t have time to watch her show. I have slowed down while eating, even though I don’t enjoy it, because my food gets cold if I try to make a hot meal last 20 minutes.

I haven’t been able to do any of the fitness goals, because my back is still hurt from doing freakin yoga last week. I’m still taking muscle relaxers and anti-inflammatory medications and hoping that I can avoid a costly trip to the doctor. One reason it’s taking me so long to heal is every time I go from the living room to the kitchen {which is 30+ times a day} I have to lift my leg over a baby gate. I can’t work the baby gate to open and close it {don’t make fun – my husband can barely do it} and that would be too risky anyways, because the puppies (which are about 35 pounds at three months old) will run by me and eat the curtains before I can get them back into the kitchen.

I made a serious attempt at meditating, but my muscle relaxers make me drowsy, so each time I put in the meditation CD and try to follow it, I fall asleep. I didn’t try meditating today, because I didn’t have the time for a nap. I consider this blog to me journal outlet, so I think I’ve got that one covered.

So far, I would give myself a C. I’ve put in enough effort to pass comfortably, but not enough to get what I would consider a good grade.

Salmon with Green Beans and Lemon Zest

 

Salmon with green beans and lemon zest. Sounds good, right? Wrong. I enjoy eating salmon most of the time, and I’m trying to eat healthy for this Body and Soul Challenge. But this dish from the January/February 2010 edition of Everyday Food was anything but good. I ate a few bites and then gave my plate to my husband who happily ate both of our dinners. He liked it – didn’t love it. I’m not making this one again.

Hopefully I’ll have more luck with tonight’s dinner of stir-fried honey-ginger chicken with peppers.

Classic Crumb Cake

 

Yesterday I baked another recipe from Martha Stewart’s Handbook: the classic crumb cake. Underneath the title of the recipe there is a statement that says, “This foolproof cake is perfect for beginning bakers.” Um, I don’t think so. First, I didn’t have a clue what a pastry blender was until I made the biscuits from this book, so I don’t know how a beginning baker would know what it is or how to use it. I thought this recipe was going to be super simple, but it took me more than 45 minutes to prepare it to put it into the oven and it took 50 minutes to bake. I had planned on making it for breakfast, but breakfast became lunch.

The recipe states that it will need to bake for 40 to 50 minutes, and I purchased a nifty little oven thermometer just to make sure that my oven was heating up to the right temperature. It was. My husband attempted to take the crumb cake out of the oven at 40 minutes, so I could test it with my toothpick. At this point, the crumb topping is basically overflowing and running down the sides of the pan. The top is jiggling when I try to test it. Obviously, it’s not ready, so I set the timer for another 10 minutes. When I test it again, it’s still wobbling in the middle. I baked it in a clear pan and I could tell that the cake on the outside was getting over-baked. I took it out three minutes later.

While my husband pulls down the wire cooling rack, he grabs another pan from the cabinet and says, “I think you baked it in the wrong size pan. This is a 13-by-9-inch pan.” Guess who told me to use the clear pan that I used….come on…I’ll give you one guess….

My husband.

The moral of the story: measure your pans if you’re not sure how big they are. We happily ate the outside of the crumb cake and threw out the mushy middle. We had some leftovers for breakfast this morning along with a healthy smoothie made from pineapple, a banana, and coconut milk.

Three Vegetarian Dinners

This week I cooked 3 vegetarian dinners to stick with my Body + Soul challenge. On Monday, we ate John Legend’s Macaroni and Cheese. I found the recipe when I looked through the meatless comfort food dishes on the Martha Stewart website. The sauce is made from evaporated milk and a little skim milk, and I didn’t love it. It made a huge amount – my husband and I had it for dinner and then I had it for lunch 3 days in a row. I like the macaroni and cheese that my husband and I make from scratch a lot more than this recipe. We got our recipe from his mother.

 

 

On Tuesday I cooked Portobello, Broccoli, and Red Pepper Melts. This recipe is from the Everyday Food Magazine from March 2008. I loved this one even though it included one of my least favorite food items: mushrooms.

 

 

Wednesday, we were supposed to have grilled mozzarella sandwiches. I found this recipe through the meatless comfort food dishes on Martha Stewart’s website. However, my husband was supposed to pick the ingredients up from the grocery store after he left work and we were going to fix them together when he got home. Most nights he leaves the office at 6:00 p.m., but of course, the night he needs to go to the grocery store he had a meeting that lasted until 7:00 p.m. By the time he would go to store, come home and fix dinner, it would be 8:00 p.m. So we made the decision to have Wendy’s instead (sorry Body + Soul challenge).

Thursday night I was excited to cook Cauliflower Gratin. This recipe was from the Everyday Food magazine from March 2007. I was hoping that I would love this dish, because there aren’t too many ways I like to eat cauliflower. It would be a good side item if you added some meat to it – like some pieces of crispy bacon or ham. But we ate it as a main dish and it didn’t have a lot of taste. My husband had to get up and add salt to his after a couple bites, because it was bland.

 

 

Tonight is our cheat night, and I can’t wait. My husband will be bringing home a pizza and a bottle of wine and we’ll enjoy watching last night’s Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice together.

Black-Bean and Brown-Rice Cakes

 

This week I’m supposed to eat mainly vegetarian meals for the Body + Soul challenge, so I went through my Martha Stewart books, magazines and the website to find vegetarian recipes for my dinners this week. The first one I tried came from the January/February 2010 Everyday Food magazine. The recipe was pretty simple to follow and the amount that it made was just right for me, my husband and my mother-in-law. I didn’t love them. Don’t get me wrong – I ate all of mine, so they weren’t awful, but I probably won’t make them again. I did really enjoy the yogurt, lime and cilantro sauce that went on top of them.

Fresh Orange and Yogurt Tart: Second Attempt

I would have posted about this earlier, but I ironically hurt my back doing yoga for the Body + Soul challenge. I have major back problems (arthritis, muscle spasms, scoliosis, and a slipped disc) and sometimes they get triggered which means it hurts to sit, stand, or do almost anything else. I’m taking muscle relaxers, and they make me super drowsy. Yesterday, I spent most of the day asleep or with the puppies.

My second attempt at the fresh orange and yogurt tart was a huge success. I’m really proud of myself and glad that I didn’t give up after the first failed attempt. It was delicious and I could feel good about eating it, because it’s only 238 calories per serving. Anybody looking for a healthier dessert option should seriously consider making this yummy tart from the January/February edition of Everyday Food.

Healthy Morning Muffins

I’m really proud of myself. So far this morning, I’ve made green juice to continue with my Body + Soul challenge and I baked these healthy morning muffins from the Everyday Food magazine. This recipe came from a reader in Alaska, and the muffins are only 186 calories with 3.6 grams of protein and 2.2 grams of fiber. I love muffins and was happy that I could eat these without feeling guilty.

The recipe states that you should bake the muffins for 23 to 25 minutes, but mine were overdone at 23 minutes. I think I’ll take them out at 20 minutes next time. Even though the outside layer of the muffin was a little too hard, they tasted delicious. I’ll definitely be cooking these again.

Today I’m trying to put together a meal list for this upcoming week. We have to stick with vegetarian recipes. My husband and I are going to do 30 minutes of yoga today to fulfill are 30 minutes of light exercise required for the Body + Soul challenge. I’m making black-bean and brown-rice cakes from Everyday Food for lunch and egg salad sandwiches from Everyday Food for dinner. It’s going to a be a day devoted to Martha Stewart.