The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

I’ve been really into raw beets lately and its fitting for this to be the first documentation of that here, as I have served various dips with raw sliced yellow and red beets at least 3 times in the past 2 months. There’s just something so pretty about them as they can easily dress up your average everyday crudites platter and the taste and texture of a raw beet is something that pairs so nicely with my favorite dips.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always loved cooked beets in almost every way, including some of those questionable way-too-many-things-going-on soaked in miso gravy ways I come across so often in vegan restaurants. Not that I’m a huge fan of this sort of establishment, but I do find myself eating at one on occasion. Needless to say, I am a huge beet fan. So much that sometimes it’s hard to completely dislike a dish that clearly doesn’t work solely because there are beets in it. It’s almost like my subconscious wants to give bonus points just for including them, despite how badly the dish failed on a whole.

I don’t know about you, but I have an extremely hard time straying away from my everyday salad dressing for my everyday salad. For the past 10 years or so I have been simply mixing some good olive oil with a squeeze of lemon juice, a smashed garlic clove and sea salt and after allowing the garlic to infuse the oil for a few minutes, tossing this with whatever greens I have on hand.

Easy and delicious.

The simplicity of this dressing has always pleased me. It’s easy but don’t be fooled into thinking this makes it ordinary in any way. The only thing you have to remember is to use good olive oil and not be afraid to season it with sea salt. I won;t get started on this last point. This dressing gets all sorts of complements too, which is even more satisfying because when someone asks you what is on this fabulous salad dressing you can simply say ” just a little olive oil and lemon juice” and you wouldn’t be stretching the truth too much.

We are finally back in our apartment after a month in boxes and I couldn’t be more happy. There’s still a lot of unpacking to do but we should be back to normal this weekend, which means that I will be posting more regularly again in the very near future.

Anyway, I made zucchini sticks! The healthy kind. And they rocked!

These little babies are a quick fix when there’s nothing much left in the kitchen. It’s also a recipe I find myself making quite often. For some reason it’s invariably the zucchini’s that are left in my fridge at the end of the week. I suppose  this is because historically I’ve never really been a huge zucchini fan. There’s something about cooked zucchini that’s never appealed to me and I can identify a few traumatic situations involving ratatouille as a child, or should I say extremely overcooked zucchini mush.

(Don’t worry Mom, I’m not referring to any meal you prepared. I promise.)

I guess that’s what turned me off, this is not a vegetable that lends itself well to long cooking times. I know people, there are a few exceptions to this and I assure you I’m just as much a fan of zucchini bread and other cake like zucchini applications. Obviously. I just find that for the most part, I prefer zucchini raw or just slightly cooked.

I wasn’t planning on doing another squash recipe post for a while. I don’t want to seem like I’m squash obsessed, or lacking any original recipe ideas. In the 5 or so months that this blog has been up, I’ve made roasted butternut squash risotto, a butternut squash loaf, roasted acorn squash and now this whole roasted acorn squash. I guess that’s not too bad right? It doesn’t even average out as once per month, which if compared to the amount of squash that we have actually consumed during this period is quite controlled.

Simplicity is everything for me right now. Over the past couple weeks I’ve been in the process of cleaning out our over cluttered apartment in preparation for the month long separation from our beloved home during the winter Olympics. As of Sunday we’ve managed to clean out almost everything in the bathroom, closet, bedroom and living room and as of this weekend we will finally be forced to do the same to our kitchen. Sigh.

I knew when it came down to it it would be challenge, but I suspect the magnitude of the challenge will be greater than I initially thought. Over the  last 3 years I’ve managed to develop an extensive collection of spices, condiments, flours, grains, dried goods of all shapes and sizes not to mention every gadget under the sun and I’m absolutely in love with every single piece of it, even the extremely unnecessary and underused – garlic peeler I’m looking at you. I think this might have something to do with being a pack rat, or at least that’s what my husband would say, I’m more comfortable with the term collector to be quite honest.