Falafel-Stuffed Roasted Tomatoes

 
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Pregnancy continues to interfere with my food blogging.

But now it’s meddling in a new and more creative way than morning sickness that’s not bad enough to complain about but was annoying enough to keep me from cooking anything interesting enough to write about. No, now it’s gotten sneakier.

Falafel-Stuffed Roasted Tomatoes

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to have dinner waiting for Chris when he got home, in an attempt to make up for all the times he made dinner this spring when I wasn’t feeling up to it. I had a cucumber and several tomatoes–beautiful tomatoes, small Camparis as red as fire engines and hovering just at the apex of perfect, sweet ripeness–so something vaguely Greek/Mediterranean seemed the way to go. I turned to a box of falafel mix in the cupboard, but suddenly plain falafel fried up from a mix seemed too boring for those tomatoes.

So I got creative. After getting a batch of potatoes bathed in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and Greek spices in to the oven to roast, I halved the tomatoes and scooped out the watery seeds, just leaving the juicy yet still firm flesh behind. Kosher salt served both to season the insides of the tomatoes and encourage them to let down some of that juice once I turned them upside down on top of some folded paper towels. I oiled the pan and the tomatoes with more olive oil and spaced the red beauties out, cut sides up, and stuck them in with the potatoes to roast for, oh, about 15 or 20 minutes at 375-400 degrees (you see, I’ve already forgotten), until they had softened and sizzled and the kitchen was perfumed with their scent. Continue reading

Seeing Signs in Cupcakes

 
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Rainbow Cupcakes

I’ve written about these cupcakes before, but in few enough words to hide the real story, the one I wanted to tell the moment I snapped this photo. But now that we’ve passed a magic number I’ve untied my own hands, so I want to share: the moment I looked down through the camera lens and saw that tiny, little red heart, I knew I was going to be someone’s mom, and that someone wanted to say “Hi.”

I’ve long thought that studying literature in college makes you more likely to see symbolism and structure in your own life. I’ve never decided whether those material metaphors woven into the ups and downs of daily existence truly mean something. It’s tempting to think so, especially when you have questions that no one can answer for you but time. Still, in a rational world, it’s natural to be suspicious of any signs you think you see in the world around you. Particularly when the sign in question has a bit too much in common with those images of the Virgin Mary that “miraculously appear” on a piece of toast. Back when I was working a dessert buffet as a pastry cook, all it took to burn the image of Trogdor (a cartoon dragon, for those not in the know) into the top of a giant creme brulee was a deft hand with a blow torch.

But this heart convinced me better than the actual pregnancy tests I took days later did. Those were easy to doubt, to question, but the moment I saw the heart, I knew. Sure, it helped that I’d been getting lightheaded all morning while I was up and around baking, and that what was to become a four-day straight headache had just set in. That didn’t stop me from knowing that this was a message just for me, the girl born on Valentine’s Day.

Hopefully, between the cupcake and the heart, this is a sign that we’re going to be welcoming a very sweet, very loving child into our lives. If nothing else, a lot of people have come by the site to see what I consider our first “baby photo”, even if they didn’t know what they were looking at.

So for my long absence–and my severe aversion to even the thought of those vegetarian Peeps I made–I have our future foodie-in-training to thank. He or she will be showing up around the first week of December, so I probably won’t be posting another flood of cookies and chocolates around Christmas again this year. But now that I’ve hit the second trimester and I’m feeling more like cooking, I hope to catch up on answering comments and be around more regularly.

And I mean that this time. As long as no one mentions those Peeps. I’m still having issues with them.

Caramelized Red Bananas

 
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For the last few years, I’ve had an occasional craving for fruit cooked in a rum sauce, but every time I’ve tried, I just get something sweet but easily forgettable (and certainly nothing that I would bother to write a recipe down for). That changed tonight.


Caramelized Red Bananas

While we were grocery shopping last weekend, I saw that Whole Foods had red bananas at a pretty decent price, so I decided to pick up a few to continue my rum sauce experiments. I know that they take well to heat (until very recently, I actually thought they had to be cooked in order to avoid a stomach ache), and I have a fondness for unusual fruit. They’ve been sitting on the counter tempting me for the last few days, so I finally decided to try again tonight with the caramel sauce. Continue reading