This Adventure in Cooking had a longer timeline than any before, and it was worth the wait. It's so delicious it needs no further introduction (or maybe that's because the painfully descriptive title says it all!), so I'm going to be like no food blogger ever and jump right to the recipe!

Mini cheesecake with lemon curd topping and a gingersnap crust

Prep time: 1.25 years

Cook time: zero minutes

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 1 lemon tree + 1/2 Tbsp lemon zest
• Some gingersnaps you got from a Christmas cookie exchange
• 1 8-oz box cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk
• Sugar, Butter, Eggs, you know, all the usual suspects when it comes to making a delightful dessert

Instructions

The Lemon Curd

1. Start with a lemon tree. You'll probably want a dwarf Meyer lemon tree, because you want to be able to pluck those juicy ripe fruits right from the comfort of your living room in the middle of a January blizzard. You'll want to acquire this tree about a year and a half in advance, because you'll need time for it to flower, nearly die from overwatering, flower again, produce lemons, and ripen said lemons before you can move on to step two. Which is...
   
2. Harvest 2 lemons from your indoor lemon tree.
   
3. Use aforementioned lemons to make a mouth-watering lemon curd. Now, I know you can probably make lemon curd in your sleep, but if you have forgotten some of the steps, you can use this handy recipe. It is a little known fact that if you follow a recipe to the letter, the creativity gods will smite you, so make the following changes:
   1. Grate both of your lemon peels until they are limp as wet rags, but still be short by an entire half tablespoon of lemon zest (that's half the required amount)! Now you're faced with a dilemma: you can either harvest your last remaining lemon, grate its peel, and still be short 1/4 tablespoon, plus have a naked lemon to deal with; or you can top off the tablespoon with the dried lemon peel you always keep in the pantry. It really is no contest, but you should spend an inordinate amount of time deliberating before choosing the second option.
   2. Decide to use up the old pats of butter you pilfered from restaurants over the past month, rather than carefully measuring out your butter like some kind of square. Three single-serve pats and a big old slice from Cheesecake Factory oughta do it!
   3.  At least one more change of your own, to appease the creativity gods.

The Cheesecake

No-bake cheesecake is one of my favorite treats to have at the ready when I get a sugar craving. It's so easy to make, and there is no limit to the things you can top it with. I make this stuff on the regular, so believe me when I say I have pro tips!

1. Open the can of condensed milk and pour about 1/3 of it into the bowl of an electric mixer. This step is important to do first, because it will prevent the cream cheese from sticking to the bowl and failing to blend.
   
2. I hope you did allow your cream cheese to warm up to room temperature, because this will also enable it to mix more effectively. Another pro tip is to use real cream cheese, not the low-fat or neufchâtel variety. While those are very tasty and indistinguishable from full-fat cream cheese in most applications, in this recipe, they will remain gritty and produce a thinner mixture. Add the cream cheese, in small chunks, mixing with the electric mixer the entire time. I like to use the "cake mixes" or "cream" settings for this, which are medium speeds on my mixer.
   
3. Once all the cream cheese has been incorporated, drizzle more condensed milk into the mixture until it has reached your desired level of sweetness. It is possible to make this recipe using an entire can of condensed milk, but you get a thicker filling and less of a hit to your blood glucose if you hold back some of the milk.
   

The crust

No judgment if you like to eat your no-bake cheesecake straight out of the mixer bowl (it's that good!) but if you want your creation to resemble a proper dessert and have an additional layer of texture and flavor, then you should give it a crust.

1. Start with a slightly disappointing neighborhood Christmas cookie exchange. Now, you're no master chef, but even you know the difference between a burnt cookie and one that's fit to give as a gift. When you bust your butt making buckeye bars (one of your favorite desserts!) and give them all away, you hope to get something of comparable value in return. Not—just as a hypothetical example and not a real-life one, naturally!—3 different varieties of overcooked cookies and a baggie of "Soft Chips Ahoy." To be fair, there were some real winners in this cookie exchange of yours, but among them, the gingersnaps were not. They were a little bit tough, if you're being perfectly honest. While tough cookies are not a joy to bite into, they do make a decent pie crust.
   
2. So deposit one on your cutting board or crushing surface of your choosing, and
3. Have at it with a rolling pin! One cookie makes a nice crust for a single-serving  cheesecake, but you can feel free to crush all of them at once and make a full-size pie.
   

The assembly process

1. Spread a layer of crushed gingersnap into a bowl or pie plate.
   
2. Spread several healthy dollops of cheesecake filling over that.
   
3. Top it all with another healthy dollop of lemon curd!

This Insta-worthy dessert (Sorry, I still have not earned my food photography badge, but it really can be pretty if done right!) tastes even better than it looks! The best news is you'll have tons of lemon curd left over, so you can really knock the creativity gods' socks off when you come up with other things to do with it (and share them with me, please)!

This is one Adventure in Cooking that cannot be categorized, in even a small way, as a misadventure!

Adventures in Cooking: Pasta with veggie dogs and mustard sauce

When I first became a vegetarian as a teenager, I was cuckoo for veggie dogs. But, over time, they became less and less appealing, until, the last time I bought them, I ate one and realized I just couldn't eat any more. But not wanting to waste food, I stuffed the remainder of the package in the freezer, and tried to think of ways that I could make them more palatable.

I think the veggie dogs alone have a texture that could make any processed-food-lover run for the hills, but I had always enjoyed them more when encased in a hot dog bun. The only problem with that is I'd stopped buying bread a long time ago, making do with whatever happened to come along with my restaurant orders, so I never have enough bun-like material at home to accompany an 8-pack of veggie dogs. Besides, vegetarian food is pretty high in carbs already, so there's no need to stack the starches by adding a nutritionless hunk of white bread. What other flavors could I use to give these veggie dogs a second chance?

Pasta was my first thought. While I have nixed the purchasing of bread, I still make an exception for chickpea pasta, which is relatively high in protein and low in carbohydrates. I always keep a box in the pantry for emergency situations like this. The solution to my glut of veggie dogs was a pasta dish with veggie dogs mixed into it. 

 

The next question was, what should I use to give the pasta flavor? I hate, like many foods, the most popular pasta topper: tomato sauce. So that was a no-go. I have some jarred alfredo sauce, but I didn't want to ruin it on a dubious experiment. Using the memory of my once-boundless love for veggie dogs, I recalled my favorite condiment on them was mustard. So if I could find a pasta sauce based with mustard, I'd be golden! (Just like the mustard! Get it!?).

You might think a mustard-based pasta sauce sounds a little unusual (I did), but the Internet usually delivers. A quick Google search turned up a recipe, and I was on the road to an Adventure in Cooking! And now, lucky reader, so are you!*

Pasta With Mustard Cream Sauce and Veggie Dogs

Ingredients

• 1 box rigatoni pasta 1/2 box chickpea penne
  
• 1 1/2 tsp salt, divided ummm, some salt
• 1 tsp oil Did that say 1tsp? Oops, I misread! Use 1 Tbsp oil
  
• 1/4 cup chopped onion Sprinkling of dehydrated onion
  
• 2 cloves garlic, minced Sprinkling of garlic powder
  
• 1/4 cup chicken broth vegetable stock
  
• 1/2 cup heavy cream frozen half-and-half, thawed and reconstituted as well as you can get it, though it will never return to its formerly creamy glory
  
• 3 Tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tsp dried tarragon ... or, if you don't have tarragon, just consider what you think tarragon probably tastes like, and then pick the most similar spice you have, which for me, turned out to be my last few desiccated sprigs of rosemary.
  
• 1/4 tsp black pepper
• Fresh Parmesan classy Kraft Parmesan from a jar
  
• Fresh basil
• Veggie dogs
• Canned mushrooms (but only if you happen to have the remains of an unfinished can in your freezer).
  

Instructions

1. Heat a large pot of water over high heat. Add 1 tsp salt and pasta. Cook for 6 minutes. Seriously, my friend, your time is too valuable and your indoor humidity too high to be cooking pasta over a stove. Get thee an Instant Pot (or a low-budget alternative), and cook your pasta according to this formula... or just wing it from memory, add two minutes instead of subtracting two, and still come out with most acceptably cooked pasta, and some overcooked bits of it splattered all over the inside of your pressure cooker. Don't forget to add the salt, though—that's one rare thing the original recipe got right!
   
2. In a medium skillet, heat 1 tsp oil over medium heat. Add onion and cook for 3-4 minutes or until softened. Add garlic and cook for one minute. Y'all, what is this obsession in the cooking world with pre-sautéing your aromatics!? Does it really taste so much better that it's worth the additional time and oil burns all over your arms? I think not. You have my blessing to just dump your powdered spices straight into the mixture without following this gratuitous step. But if you're curious, as I was, and realize you're going to need to turn on the burners eventually, you might as well try to pre-roast the spices in a dry saucepan before adding the remaining ingredients. Does it improve the flavor? Does it ruin it? I don't know, but at least it will neither take very long nor result in oil splattering everywhere!
   
3. Add chicken broth and cook for 2-3 minutes.
4. Whisk in mustard and tarragon and cook for another 2-3 minutes.
5. Whisk in heavy cream and cook for 1 minute. Forget about all this laborious adding of ingredients and stirring and adding more! What are you, made of minutes!? You can put all the remaining ingredients (except the basil, Parmesan, pasta, and dogs) in one saucepan, stir it up, and set it all on the back burner to simmer while you work on the main event: the dogs. Stir periodically if the spirit moves you.
   
6. 
   Since you never used the oil that was intended for roasting the garlic and onion, you can use it to fry your veggie dogs. Pour some liberally into a skillet and let it heat up, while simultaneously slicing your still-slightly-frozen veggie dogs as thin as possible (the better to minimize their flavor when you eat them!) into the skillet.
   
7. Dump the frozen chunk of mushrooms into the skillet with the veggie dog slices. As it thaws, you can peel off mushrooms until all of them are mixed in and somewhat warm. Simultaneously push the veggie dogs around in the oil until they start to look cooked.
8. Add hot pasta to sauce and toss to combine. Cook for an additional minute.
9. Add veggie dogs to sauce and toss again.
   
10. Wonder why the original recipe mentioned basil and Parmesan in the ingredients list, because that was the end of the instructions, and their function was never explained. Figure they're supposed to be for garnish, so pour yourself a bowl of this pasta mastapiece, sprinkle with some Parmesan cheese, and then top with a few leaves of basil from your garden. You had a fresh herb on hand, which totally gives you chef points! High fives!
    

High fives also, for completing this recipe! When you eat it, you will no doubt be delighted. Or at least you won't go hungry for the night.

It's actually not that bad, and it looks so cute with the fresh basil on top and the fall decor in the background! But the veggie dogs are still barely palatable. Let this be a reminder to never buy veggie dogs again, no matter how cheap they are on sale!

 

*If you're not an adventurous cook, but you like the idea of pasta in creamy mustard sauce, I suppose you can try the original recipe, here.

Adventures in Tofu

Are you tired of hearing about insomnia yet? I am, too, so let's talk about something much more pleasant: cooking!

Wait.

Is cooking pleasant?

I'm not so sure—and if you agree, you'll love this ultra-low-effort recipe that doesn't require any cooking at all!

It starts with a block of tofu. Much like quinoa, tofu is a protein-packed health food with absolutely no enjoyable qualities whatsoever. While quinoa tends toward bland and grainy, tofu tends toward bland and squishy. No matter how "extra-firm" the package label claims, the substance inside provides nothing to sink one's teeth into.

Sometimes I buy tofu anyway, because I'd like to eat a little healthier. And then it sits in the refrigerator, burning a hole through the shelf while I try to come up with palatable ways to prepare it. This time around, I came across a recipe for "methi tofu," which sounded interesting because it was the only tofu recipe in pages upon pages of search results that didn't scream "flavorless-but-spicy!!"

However, I took one look at the ingredients list and threw up my hands. This was a dish that was going to require cooking. So much cooking! Suddenly, in the blazing heat of the July day that I set out on this mission, I knew there was no way I was going to fire up a stove and sauté anything!

So I did what any lazy chef would do: I cut some of the tofu into cubes, sprinkled it with some crushed methi leaves from my spice cabinet, salted it, and put it in the fridge to "marinate."

In case I were to find my artless methi tofu unappetizing, I took the remainder of the tofu block, and mixed half of it with some bean stir fry sauce. Then I took the other half, added some Italian dressing mix and (because I was really getting creative now!) some diced green tomato, and left those to marinate, too.

 

After a day, I ate all three and found them...underwhelming? But really not any worse than how they probably would have come out if I'd actually cooked them. This is tofu we're talking about—even the most loving of preparation methods leaves something to be desired in the eating.

When I ate the leftovers the following day, I improved upon my work by tossing some thawed frozen peas into the methi tofu. This added a little texture to the mix, and raised the palatability from just-choke-it-down health meal to almost-enjoyable cold entree! I think the key to making this recipe is not to think of it as a tofu dish, but rather as a tofu-based salad. 

 

In case you'd like to experience this culinary marvel for yourself, here's a recipe!

Cold Tofu Salad

Ingredients:

• 1 block extra-firm tofu (if you want it even firmer, you can press it first)
• 1 seasoning of your choice (some ideas: salad dressing, spice packets, stir-fry sauces)
• Salt, if the seasoning doesn't contain it
• Vegetables to complement your dish (Because this is a no-cook meal, I recommend frozen vegetables that you have thawed, or something like tomatoes or leafy greens, which don't need to be cooked).

Steps

1. Cube the tofu.
   
2. Mix all ingredients together.
   
3. Refrigerate for 24 hours.
   
4. Eat and enjoy!
   

Adventures in Cooking: Broccamole

There are so many things that you can make with silken tofu! Smoothies, fruit dips, and stuff that is supposed to resemble cheese or pudding but doesn't—these are all popular tofu recipes. Basically, if it is supposed to be mushy, creamy, or somewhere in between, you can make an unconvincing vegan version of it with silken tofu!

If you have recently used some tofu to make creamed spinach that doesn't taste like creamed spinach, and still have some left over, you might want to search the internet for recipes you can use it in. Or not, because I've saved you the bother and hunted down the ultimate use for leftover tofu—it's broccamole!

This recipe has the kind of name that I enjoy inventing myself for other recipes I've tried — such as "tacofu" (tofu taco filling), and "no-tato salad" (potato salad made from cauliflower) — but this one came ready-made by the recipe author. The name alone is reason enough to give it a shot, but combined with the fact that it will help you use up the remains of a broccoli crown that you've had sitting around for just a tad too long make it a no-brainer!

Now, I've tried a lot of new recipes over the past year, but there's "trying recipes," and then there's "Adventures in Cooking!" I've realized there are actually a number of criteria that must be met in order for a kitchen session to qualify as a true Adventure:

1. You must attempt to make a smaller amount of food than specified by the original recipe
   
2. You must substitute, remove, or otherwise alter at least one ingredient
   
3. You must cut as many corners as possible during preparation
   
4. The process or outcome must be terrible, unexpected, or at least mildly comedic.
   

I'll leave it to you to tell me if I nailed #4, but in making broccamole, I followed the first three principles so diligently that it's not even worth trying to replicate the original recipe here. Instead, I'll just describe how you can follow the Rules of Adventuring so that they result in something that might be generously referred to as broccamole.

1. You must attempt to make a smaller amount of food than specified by the original recipe.

If you only have 1/4 a block of tofu and something like a cup of  broccoli florets, you're on the right track, because the recipe calls for more of both. The goal is to finish them each off, so don't worry about the exact ratio; just throw them in the blender and hope for the best! Since this lack of measurement means you can't neatly calculate the remainder of the ingredients, just guess on them all!

2. You must substitute, remove, or otherwise alter at least one ingredient

It's a good plan to not have most of the ingredients in the recipe. Try something like the following: Never buy fresh cilantro, because you'll only use a few sprigs of it for any given recipe and the rest will always go bad, even when you attempt to root it in water! So just use dried cilantro. Use the same principle for tomatoes, but instead of buying them dried (impossible), just wait to use them until they're on the verge of spoiling, then dice them and stick them in the freezer so you can at least use them in cooked food in the future. Then you will conveniently be lacking fresh tomatoes when it comes time to prepare this recipe the next day. Onion and jalapeno should never make it into any recipe, so enough said about them! The remaining ingredients (spices mostly) are easy! Most spices are overpowering when used as specified by a recipe, so feel free to just sprinkle them conservatively into the mixture until it smells right.

3. You must cut as many corners as possible during preparation.

The original recipe is only one step—but really 5 steps lazily combined into one, so the corners are already pre-cut, if you ask me!

4. The outcome must be terrible, unexpected, or at least mildly comedic.

Well, imagine what you would get if you took some mushy cooked broccoli and some tofu, and you pureed them together. That's what broccamole tastes like! Pretty terrible, right? Like most recipes that attempt to replace one ingredient with a healthier one, this food is nothing like the inspiration. It doesn't help that, in the absence of the onion, peppers, tomatoes, and fresh cilantro, the resulting substance has no mouth feel. But at least it's the right color! In the end, that's what's most important.

My first attempt at eating broccamole was just as terrible as you might expect from an Adventure in Cooking. I just dipped some leftover garlic bread in it and paired it with a side of lettuce. Somehow when combined with garlic bread, the spices in the broccamole could no longer be tasted; so it lost the one quality that gave it an edge over a jar of baby food.

On my second attempt, I got wise and added in some chopped bits of the remaining broccoli stem, for texture, and scooped the stuff over some black beans on a tortilla with olives. I even grated some carrot on top because I needed it to look cute for a picture. With the broccamole serving more as a condiment than the main event, it was much less disappointing. But hardly worth the effort at that rate. Unless I have more tofu to use up and no better ideas, I probably won't make it again.

In fact, I definitely won't make it again in the near future, because the broccamole broke my blender! Unexpected, right? My blender is a relic from the 1960's that I found on Craigslist for 10 dollars. Though the motor is still going strong, the plastic parts have all turned brittle, and there are a number of cracks in the blade assembly. When I finished blending my broccamole to find gooey gobs of greenish gunk all over the inside of the blender base, I decided I'd repaired it for the last time.

I'm getting a new blender, and this time, I'm getting one with a food processor function too. Truth be told, I was so spoiled by my last boyfriend's insanely powerful Vitamix that I might just be forced to spring for one of those. It's only 450 dollars.

So, mildly comedic? You see these tears in my eyes? They're totally tears of laughter. Totally.

Adventures in Cooking: Lazy Vegan Protein Bowl

I never realized how much restaurant dining was part of my life until it stopped being part of my life.

A year ago, I thought I was dining out less often, but just look at me now! In my geographic region, all restaurants have been closed since the middle of March, so I haven't had table service since at least that long ago. It's still possible to order carry-out, but, as I quickly came to realize, about half the fun of dining out was the company, and half was the ambience. Without either of those things, the remaining draw of the restaurant – the food – doesn't really seem worth the price any more. So I mostly stopped buying it.

As it turns out, once you your continuous influx of restaurant leftovers dries up, you have to be a lot more proactive in providing yourself with nourishment. For me, that meant actually cooking, something I've never been good at. Since I was embarking on a learning experience, I thought it would be beneficial for me to document my progress, so I kept a list of every recipe I prepared from March 16 to April 10. In that three-week period, I tried 16 new recipes, most of which I disliked (for the record, my favorite so far has been Old Fashioned Potato Salad, which I modified heavily with my usual adventurous flair!). I continued the cooking spree after that, but I stopped keeping track, because, well, no one cares.

With so many Adventures in Cooking! occurring at an unprecedented rate, they had lost their novelty factor. I decided not to blog about each and every (or even) one of them, but the one type of cooking adventure I decided was still worth recording is the type in which I invent the recipe myself!

So here is a new one for your perusal! It's an ingenious 2-minute meal that might even rival my world-famous Nearly Nachos. Sans spiciness, devoid of dairy, and absent of alliums, yet somehow still enjoyable to eat, it's a picky vegetarian's protein-packed dream dinner (at least, if said vegetarian has low standards)! It's...

The Lazy Vegan Protein Bowl!

Ingredients

• Frozen shelled edamame beans (only a masochist buys edamame beans still in the pod)
• Dijon mustard
• Quinoa

Steps

1. Measure out about as many edamame beans as you think will make a satisfying meal for you (I used about 1/3 cup. It was not quite enough!)
2. Microwave the beans until they are hot (66 seconds worked for me!)
3. Add a spoonful of dijon mustard and stir.
4. Sprinkle with a topping of uncooked quinoa* (I used approximately 1Tbsp)

Eat and enjoy!

*At last! I've discovered the secret to making quinoa somewhat palatable! Rather than cooking it into a gritty porridge of bland homogeneity, simply sprinkle it on top of other foods while still raw. The same nondescript grain that's unbearably boring when cooked becomes the very texture to complete the meal when used uncooked. Quinoa—the spice of life! Will wonders never cease?

Adventures in Cooking: Chocolate Covered Ginger

Most of my Adventures in Cooking! are born out of necessity—the necessity to get rid of a specific pesky ingredient in my possession. But more often lately, I've been experiencing necessity of a different sort—the necessity of having a food I can't buy ready-made.

While I can supply most of my basic needs at the local supermarkets, it recently came to my attention that certain dietary staple had become scarce everywhere: chocolate-covered ginger.

Now you might be thinking, "I never knew chocolate-covered ginger was a basic need," and you'd be mostly right. But when your will to live is contingent on satisfying your very selective sweet tooth, then chocolate-covered ginger becomes a bona fide requirement. And when my supply of it ran out this summer, I found myself in the throes of a chocolate-covered-ginger emergency!

Chocolate-covered-ginger – we'll call it CCG for short because that makes it sound like a drug, and this the story of my addiction – was the food I never knew I needed until I ran out of it. I discovered its existence when I first started working at the organic market 15 years ago, and I was surprised to discover I enjoyed the tingly feeling of ginger and the crunchy feeling of sugar granules and the euphoric snap of dark chocolate all combined in one. But I didn't eat it that often, so it took me probably two years to consume my last quarter-pound tub of the stuff.

Once it was gone, I kinda-sorta started missing it, so I put it on my grocery list to buy again when I had the chance. For months, I never had the chance. At Mom's Organic Market, my former source of it, the CCG shelf remained puzzlingly empty for weeks on end. I took a trip to the Amish market, where bulk snacks and candies of all sorts can be found, and eventually discovered a shelf labeled "chocolate covered ginger," but what was on that shelf were some mysterious chocolate spheres the size of marbles—not the oversized sheets of ginger and chocolate that I knew and loved. Surely those balls were something else, taking up the place of a product that was temporarily out of stock, just as the CCG had been at MOM's.

But then, weeks later, I noticed the CCG shelf at MOM's had been refilled...with the same tiny chocolate spheres I'd seen at the Amish market. This was not a good sign. It meant that chocolate-covered ginger slices had been discontinued and replaced with balls...and chocolate-covered ginger balls were not at all what I wanted!

Now you might be thinking, "So what? Your ginger comes in ball form instead of sheet form. I think you'll survive," and you'd be right. But my very selective sweet tooth only enjoys foods that it can nibble on, and tiny candies that must be eaten whole do not meet that qualification. I don't waste my time (or my limited carbs-quota) on sweets that aren't truly a treat in every way, so (as soon as I had confirmed that the sliced variety was not available online either), CCG was effectively off the table.

You might be thinking that would be good for my aforementioned carbs-quota, since I wouldn't be squandering any of it on chocolate-covered ginger, but alas, that was not the case. Scarcity drives demand, and I could not get the visions of CCG to stop dancing in my head.

However, it's not actually that hard to cover anything in chocolate, I reasoned. So I decided to make my own! The results of this Adventure in Craving Cooking are this very simple recipe:

Chocolate Covered Something-or-other

Ingredients:

• Candied/crystallized ginger slices (or whatever else you feel like coating with chocolate)
• Chocolate chips (however much you estimate will cover the amount of something-or-other you're using)

Steps:

1. Prepare a surface where the chocolate-covered something can cool and harden. I used a very shabby old silicone baking mat.
2. Melt chocolate chips. I hope I don't have to explain how to melt chocolate? There are tons of tutorials out there.
3. Using a spoon, spread melted chocolate over the entirety of each something-or-other (except the part where you're holding it between your fingers—it's fine to just leave that uncovered)
4. Place chocolate-covered somethings on your work surface, making sure not to let them touch.
5. Allow to harden in the refrigerator.
6. When they are fully cooled, peel them away from the surface and enjoy!

Chef's tip: If you end up with leftover chocolate, you can spread it onto a flexible object such as a plastic lid or the same silicone baking sheet. Then when it's hard, you can break it into chunks and use it in brownies, or just save it for the next time you're jonesing for chocolate-covered anything, cause now you have a foolproof recipe for making it!

Adventures in Cooking: Celery Surprise

Every great Adventure in Cooking! begins with a single ingredient—usually one that's been sitting around way past its expiration date and desperately needs to get cooked. Today the honor goes to a large collection of low-carb gluten-free sandwich buns, some of the last few relics of my ex-boyfriend's tenure as my roommate. I don't eat sandwiches very often – and when I do, I only use half a bun – and half of that time, it's the other half-bun from my last restaurant sandwich – so these singly-wrapped buns that he bought in bulk shortly before moving out have been cluttering up my freezer for almost a year.

But what do you do with buns when you don't eat a lot of sandwiches? Eating more sandwiches sounds like a sensible answer, but this adventurous chef has a better idea—top a casserole with them!

I have a soft spot for casseroles. They almost always involve cheese and carbs, cooking them often requires little more than stuffing them in an oven and forgetting about them for a half-hour, and they can be made from almost anything.

For this casserole, the "anything" was going to have to be celery, as I had a large bag of celery sticks in the fridge and I might as well make use of them!

Armed with my two key ingredients (celery and breadcrumbs), I scoured the internet for casserole recipes that included them both. The winner was "Creamy celery casserole" from Allrecipes. Of course, this particular recipe also featured a few other ingredients I don't have and don't even like, so I was going to have to employ my creativity. And my math skills. Since the original recipe serves 8, and that's a lot of meals for a singleton who might not even enjoy the finished product, my first step was to divide the recipe in half.

Mental challenges! That's what Adventures in Cooking! are all about!

The ingredients

• 4 pats of restaurant butter (hopefully this is approximately equal to 2 Tbsp)
• 1 heaping cup thinly sliced celery (because somehow in your mind, 4 divided by 2 equals 1, but 1 isn't quite enough when you look at it)
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour (rounding up since 1 1/2 Tbsp requires too many spoons)
• 1/2 heaping teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• Some water, just a little
• 1 huge white mushroom and 3 smaller ones (because that sounds approximately equal to a half a can of them, right?)
• 2 tablespoons chopped green bell peppers
  
• 1 (2 ounce) jar chopped pimento peppers
• Forget the peppers and just use 2 carrots instead
• 1/2 really heaping cup shredded Cheddar cheese (no such thing as too much cheese!)
• 1/2 cup soft bread crumbs
• 1 Tablespoon butter, melted
• More bread crumbs (because, darn it, a cup of shredded bread comprises a surprisingly small amount of hamburger bun)
• More butter (because more buns)

The Steps

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. You don't have a can of mushrooms like the original recipe called for, but no surprises there—you came prepared! Slice your fresh mushrooms and microwave for about 99 seconds. Pour off water.
3. Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat, and cook celery until tender, about 5 minutes. Move celery aside, and mix in flour and salt. Pour in milk, and mix all ingredients, stirring constantly, until thickened. (Seriously, original recipe? That's like at least 4 steps...but I'm about to turn it into more!)
4. Cook celery until tender, about 5 minutes.
5. Surprise! Since you improvisationally added carrots to this recipe, you need to pre-cook them as well! In between stirs of celery, chop carrots into bite-sized pieces. Add to celery and butter and continue stirring.
6. Move celery aside, but to where, original recipe? This saucepan's all full of surprise carrots! Dump flour and salt all over tiny cleared area in bottom of saucepan as well as all over the celery and carrots. Stir quickly, lest the flour get singed.
7. Surprise! Since you don't have milk, you have to make milk from powder. As a general rule, you use 1/3 the amount of milk powder as the total amount of milk you want, so roughly fill 1/3 of the 1/2-cup measure you're using with powdered milk, then fill the rest with water.
8. Mix milk powder and water with other ingredients, stirring constantly, until thickened.
9. If you've been improvising correctly, it should thicken almost immediately, so sprinkle in some extra water to reassure yourself that you've used enough liquid.
   
10. Stir mushrooms and...nothing else, because you don't like peppers...into mixture.
11. Mix in cheese, and stir until melted.
12. In a small bowl, blend bread crumbs and melted butter.
13. Transfer the celery mixture to a medium baking dish, and sprinkle with the bread crumb mixture.
14. Surprise! Not only does 1/2 cup of crumbled bread only use up 1/6 of the three hamburger buns you thawed, but it also doesn't even begin to cover the top of this wide, shallow casserole. Crumble up the remainder of Bun #1 and mix with another tbsp. of butter. Sprinkle on top of the casserole.
15. Bake 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until lightly browned.

Congratulations! You have converted a simple 4-step recipe into a 15-step magnum opus, and hopefully, in the process, produced an edible casserole. 

Surprise! Due to the magic of fuzzy math, you'll probably only be able to wheedle three servings out of this ostensibly 4-serving half-a-casserole. But that's fine, because you've still got a lot of hamburger buns to get rid of. It'll be no time at all before you're ready to go back to Plan A: Eating more sandwiches.

Palak Paneer, the wimpy American way

What do you do when you love Indian food, but you can't tolerate spiciness?

Well, for one thing, you can never buy pre-packaged Indian food or seasoning mixes, because they will burn your tongue off on the first bite. You basically have two options: 1) You can order all your Indian food at a restaurant and request that they prepare it "mild," or 2) you can learn to make it mild yourself!

After many years of trying Option #1 with varying degrees of success, I finally moved on to Option #2. But like any good wimpy American, I imbued the process with my close-held values of laziness and ingenuity in equal measure. The result of this  Adventure in Cooking! is a recipe for one of my favorite foods, palak paneer (spinach with cheese cubes), with 90% of its Indian-ness stripped out and modified for an unadventurous palate!

The hardest part of developing this dish was getting over my fear of Indian recipes, which always seem to have 1,001 ingredients, most of which I don't even possess. I realized that the most daunting part of almost any Indian recipe was compiling the vast number of spices required for that distinctive flavor, so here's where the ingenuity comes in. If I were to mix all the spices in advance, I would have a seasoning blend (you know, something like "Italian seasoning" or "Chinese 5-Spice") that I could just toss into my spinach and be 50% of the way there already!

I surveyed a number of palak paneer recipes on the internet, and came to the conclusion that most of them had several spices in common. I figured out a sensible relative quantity for each of them, and then mixed them all together.

So here is Part 1. Prepare in advance and thank me later!

Part 1: Palak Paneer Seasoning

• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp coriander powder
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp ginger
• a pinch of cardamom

Feel free to adjust the amounts of each spice to your own taste. Being an allium-hater myself, I was very sparing with the garlic and onion, for example. Some recipes also called for curry powder, and while I think that's actually a spice blend of its own, you could throw it in if you were so inclined!

I found that one bowl of palak paneer required about 1/4 teaspoon of this seasoning mix to acquire sufficient flavor, so this mix recipe should get you through about 16 servings of palak paneer! Labor-saving at its finest!

Part 2: Palak Paneer

Once you have the seasoning, making actual palak paneer is a cinch! I happened to have some creamed spinach that had been – you guessed it – sitting in the freezer for over a year, so that saved me lots of bother cooking spinach, mixing it with cream, etc. All I had to do was reheat the spinach and add some cheese.

Naturally, being an American, I did not have paneer lying about, but I did have some Grandpa's Cheese Barn grilling cheese, which has a texture very similar to Indian paneer, with the added benefit of being more salty. Much better for my blood pressure!

So preparing the dish is now a simple 4-step process:

1. Put creamed spinach in a bowl
2. Mix in 1/4 tsp of palak paneer seasoning
3. Toss in some cubed pieces of paneer (or grilling cheese)
4. Microwave for approximately 88 seconds.*

*Pro tip! No Indian curry would be complete without a side of flatbread. You can put your bread plate upside-down on the curry bowl while cooking, to minimize the inevitable splattering that will occur.

I have to say that I'm pleased with the way this recipe turned out. I will probably keep the palak paneer seasoning as a regular resident of my spice cabinet, so I can throw together a curry in record time whenever the mood strikes!

Adventures in Cooking: Oyster mushroom tacos

You know what they say: Behind every great taco is a great story, and behind every great story is a great mycelium. Here is the story of my mycelium.

One day recently, a friend called me from a farmer's market, and asked me if I wanted to grow my own mushrooms. Sure, I said. I couldn't see why not.

An hour or so later, said friend showed up at my house with a large plastic bag filled with an unsightly gray-and-white mass. It did not look appetizing, but it was, apparently, the substrate upon which I was destined to grow my own oyster mushrooms. It did not come with instructions. I asked my friend how it was supposed to work, and he said something about putting the bag in a humid spot like the bathroom. That was all he had.

I looked online for further information, and eventually discovered a couple of tutorials that featured mushroom bags similar to my own. The mass inside, supposedly a mixture of sawdust and mushroom spores, was supposed to be a mycelium (immature fungal colony) which would sprout when exposed to the the right conditions—namely a lot of humidity and just a little bit of indirect sunlight. I was supposed to cut a few slits in the bag, place it somewhere shady, and mist with water twice a day.

The home I chose for my mycelium was on top of a wardrobe. About a week of spritzing later, the first fruiting bodies sprouted from one of the slits. I was excited. Over the next few days, my oyster mushrooms grew in size until they could be ignored no longer, until I harvested them with great pride.

Then my excitement promptly turned to anxiety. How on earth was someone who never cooks supposed to eat these mushrooms?

As usual, the Internet was my saving grace. I found a couple of oyster mushroom recipes, and among them, one for oyster mushroom tacos. Tacos would be the perfect food, since I have lots of taco ingredients stockpiled over the course of several visits to Mexican restaurants!

Once I had skimmed over the recipe and gotten the gist of what comprises a mushroom taco, I decided to wing it—that's how Adventures in Cooking are born! So without further ado, let's see the recipe:

Mushroom Tacos Taco, Rube Goldberg style!

Prep time: a few months + 1 week + 15 minutes + 1 night + 5 minutes

Servings: four one

Ingredients:

• Oyster mushroom mycelium
• Taco seasoning...or any old bunch of miscellaneous spices
• Olive oil
• Flour tortillas
• Maybe some nutritional yeast, why not?
• Cheese? Sure.
• Something green and leafy to put on top of the tacos
• Sour cream would be nice, but if you don't have it, NBD.
• Guacamole

Steps:

1. Visit some Mexican restaurants and acquire the following: a huge collection of tortillas because your boyfriend always orders fajitas but doesn't eat carbs; guacamole; some of those black beans that always come as a side dish but that no one ever eats except the vegetarian (you). It would be nice to get some sour cream during this process, but if you don't, NBD. I hope you're not hungry yet, because this step will take a few months.
2. Grow oyster mushrooms from mycelium. Ripen for 1 week.
3. Cut mushrooms from mycelium.
4. Pour some olive oil into a heated skillet—no need to measure, just put in as much as you think you'll need to properly sauté whatever quantity of mushrooms you have.
5. Dump mushrooms into skillet.
6. While the mushrooms are cooking, sprinkle with taco seasoning. If you have taco seasoning, but are worried it will be too spicy for you, you can use some taco seasoning recipes from the internet as inspiration. These recipes seem to all include the following: ground chile, onion, garlic, oregano, cumin, paprika, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle the mushrooms with a small amount of each of these spices according to your taste. If you don't like spicy food or alliums, put hardly any chile powder or garlic or onion, but go heavy on the oregano.
7. By the time you're done sprinkling spices, the mushrooms should be basically cooked. Taste one, and immediately realize two things: 1) Despite barely using any chile powder, the mushrooms are too spicy, and 2) they are almost uniformly as tough as leather!
8. To solve #1 above, rinse all the mushrooms under running water to wash off as much of the spiciness as possible.
9. To solve #2 in Step 7 above, cut off and discard the stems of each mushroom. By this point, you will have barely enough mushrooms to fill one half a taco. That's OK, it just means you'll need less spice for step 10!
10. Re-apply all of the spices as in Step 5 above, but in smaller quantities...and leave out the ground chile.
11. You had originally planned to mix this taco filling with corn and cilantro to make it a proper Mexican dish, but you have since realized you do not have any corn. To help fill out the really pitiful amount of mushrooms, sprinkle them with nutritional yeast, which you just happened to find in the spice cabinet. It's a vegan cheese substitute, so it should add a little oomph to the recipe!
12. As a base for your tacos half-taco, you will need one tortilla. Unfortunately, all of your tortillas have been in the freezer for a few months, and they have become desiccated and inseparable from each other. Find a different frozen tortilla that was stored singly and still has a little give to it, and hope for the best.
13. Pack up all your ingredients and store for later consumption. The next day, bring the ingredients to work, because the best lunch is one that needs to be assembled on top of the office mini-fridge.
14. Upon arriving at work, realize that you have some black beans in the fridge from Friday's visit to the taqueria that you had totally forgotten about! Heave a sigh of relief. Between the mushrooms and the beans, there should be enough food to make your half a taco into a whole taco!
15. Spread the beans and mushrooms on top of the tortilla. Add a dollop of guacamole (also left over from Friday's taco run) and some shredded cheddar. It would be nice if you had some sour cream, but you don't, so NBD! Garnish with arugula.
16. Attempt to eat your taco, but find that even this slightly-less-desiccated tortilla is too crunchy for human consumption, so instead eat the filling with a fork.

You survived your first foray into making oyster mushroom tacos! Now you just have to wait for your mycelium to produce more shrooms (it's supposed to fruit about 3 times before it's depleted), and then you can try it all over again!

Adventures in Cooking: Quinoa

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but this year was, kind of coincidentally, an exception. A few days before 2019 began, I took stock of my eating habits and concluded that the largest portion of my protein intake came from cheese. Now, far be it from me to knock this most wonderful of foods, but I did decide it wouldn't hurt to cut down on the cheese and focus more on lean – ideally vegan – protein sources.

And thus began my relationship with quinoa. While I was cleaning out the kitchen cabinets in a post-Christmas organizing frenzy, I found a 2-quart carton of uncooked quinoa, a holdover from one of my boyfriend's many brief flings with ambitious cooking. I don't recall what recipe he tried to make with quinoa, but he never made it again, and the quinoa has been sitting in the cabinet for at least a year since then. Quite convenient for me, since quinoa is practically a vegan superfood. It has one of the highest protein contents of any grain, and it's a rare vegetarian source of all 9 essential amino acids. Unfortunately for me, it is also unappetizing to the extreme.

When prepared, quinoa resembles nothing so much as a bowl of coarse sand. It has no flavor to speak of, so consuming it is only slightly more appealing than eating said sand. It's slightly more chewable than sand, but being likewise comprised of tiny particles, it doesn't provide anything satisfying to bite into.

There are many recipes on the internet for quinoa, but like any good Adventurer, I decided to go my own way. The first time I prepared the stuff, I followed the simplest cooking instructions (1 part quinoa, 2 parts water, boil until the seeds have absorbed all the water). I figured I'd flavor it with cumin and fresh cilantro and have a quick 15-minute sort-of-Mexican meal. And I did! But it was so boring, I could barely choke it down. In spite of all the spices and all the salt (and more salt! And more!), my healthy dish was as bland as health food is reputed to ever be.

The next time I made the quinoa, I followed an actual recipe. It called for sauteed greens and curry powder. The greens added texture (a slimy, stringy one, of course), but I still felt like the soul was being sucked out of me with every bite.

The third time I made quinoa, I decided to really rock the boat and mix it with cashews! While not as low-fat as pure quinoa, at least a few cashews scattered throughout the bowl would give me something solid to bite into from time to time. The spice rack did not offer any inspiration as to how to season my delicious dish, so I consulted Google and came up with a mix of garlic and turmeric. I threw in some more dried cilantro leaves for the heck of it. And salt. More salt! 

 

 

The turmeric gave the quinoa a bright yellow color, so at least it looked fun, even if it wasn't going to be any fun to eat. And it wasn't. But it was better than my first batch. Either the turmeric or the cashews or perhaps both imparted a slightly sweet flavor, that made the eating interesting, if not exactly delicious.

The going has been ploddingly slow, but I'm learning something about cooking quinoa. The best way to enjoy quinoa is to just make sure you eat it with a lot more stuff that's not quinoa! My next Adventure in Cooking is totally going to be quinoa-sprinkled ice cream!

Adventures in Cooking: Green Bean Casserole Supreme

If you've been following my Adventures in Cooking!, you'll notice that they often involve ingredients that I've acquired under unusual circumstances, and I'm trying to find innovative ways to use them up.

The key player in today's Adventure is the humble green bean. I buy my green beans frozen from Costco and eat them raw (after thawing, they have the consistency of cooked beans). But my most recent bag of green beans took an extraordinarily long time to get finished. After surviving two near-complete defrosts due to equipment and power failures, they had turned withered and mushy, and I could no longer stomach eating them alone.

But they were still edible; they just needed to be cooked and combined with other foods to disguise their flaws. What better way to prepare some inferior beans, than to whip them up into a green bean casserole?

I do not recall exactly when I discovered green bean casserole, but I know it was fairly late in life (maybe college?), and I know I fell instantly in love. If you think about it, green bean casserole is really no great shakes—basically it's a can of soup and some beans, but I think I was enchanted by the onion straws on the top, which I also had never tasted before, and which were crispy and fun. Well, in more recent years, I've discovered I have a sensitivity to onion and so I try to steer clear of onion straws, but I still harbor fond memories of my early experiences with the dish.

So, to use up my green beans, I vowed to make them into a casserole...but, since this was not going to be just any casserole side dish, but a full-on meal...I was going to turn them into green bean casserole on steroids!

Here are the steps to replicate my great Adventure in Cooking!:

1. Thaw and thoroughly drain your freezer-burned green beans
2. Cut green beans into 1-inch long slices
3. Preheat oven to 350°F
4. Dump green beans in a casserole dish
5. Top with 1 can of condensed cream of mushroom soup
6. Throw in the remains of a bag of cheddar cheese
7. Add in a handful of Quorn vegetarian Chik'n cutlets
8. Stir.
9. Grab a frozen hunk of sourdough bread, microwave for a minute, then tear into breadcrumbs and toss over top of the casserole.
10. Bake casserole at 350 covered for 25 minutes or thereabouts (it's hard to tell, because you naturally start cooking before the oven is fully preheated)
11. Uncover the casserole and bake about 10 minutes more.
12. Let cool for a few minutes, then eat!

The verdict? I do not love Green Bean Casserole on Steroids (but I'm going to call it Green Bean Casserole Supreme so that other people might be suckered by the nicer-sounding name)! Everything in it is too mushy except the breadcrumbs, of which there are not enough. I think I might have liked it better if I'd put the cheese on top rather than mixing it in, but there's no going back now! Fortunately, I still have a few more beans left over from my last Costco bag, so maybe I'll try this recipe again sometime. As soon as I've choked down all 5 of the remaining servings of this attempt...

Adventures in Cooking: Avocado Toast

You probably already know I'm a picky-eating vegetarian, and that means I often have to reject entire restaurants on the grounds that they have nothing on the menu I can eat. But there is one thing any restaurant can offer and be assured that I'll happily dine there—avocado toast! People liked to make jokes about how much Millennials love avocado toast (at least until avocado toast morphed into a metaphor for economic collapse), but regardless of the dish's spotty reputation, this Millennial is happy it became a trend.

Unfortunately, while avocado toast makes a nice splurge for a single-meal Sunday, it is entirely impractical as part of a daily diet. A dollar-twenty-nine for a single avocado on sale!? That is not the way I spend my money. In fact, I cannot recall a single time when I have ever purchased a whole avocado (though I have purchased a house, so maybe I'm not such a Millennial after all).

The other thing people like to make jokes about is how really bad cooks can't even cook toast. Well, I confess, I am the butt of those particular jokes. I cannot make toast. Just add avocados, and you've got another kind of toast I can't make either. But that's about to change, because I just snagged a free avocado!

Let's have an Adventure in Cooking together, and make...

A Recipe for Avocado Toast!

Ingredients

• 1 avocado. You can't afford to buy an avocado, because you're a Millennial, so use the one that your coworker left on top of the mini-fridge 3 weeks ago. The first week, it was wrapped in a paper towel and you didn't know what it was. The second week, the paper towel had disappeared but the avocado remained. The third week, you went away for a vacation. The fourth week, your coworker went away for a vacation, and you decide that if anyone is going to eat that avocado, it's going to be you.
• 1 piece of garlic bread that you took home from a restaurant and stashed in the freezer.
• 1 tomato, because you wanted to put radish slices on top of your avocado toast, but you could only buy too many radishes in a bunch, so you needed something else red to make your toast photogenic.
• A handful of arugula, because your boyfriend loves that stuff and you usually have it lying around, plus it seems to be a common item to put on avocado toast.
• Salt

Instructions

1. Stealthily remove avocado from lunchroom and rehearse the story about why you took it, should anyone come questioning you.
2. Slice avocado in half and remove pit and skin.
3. In a small bowl, mash up half the avocado with a fork.
4. Cut garlic bread in half and put in toaster oven. Feel the sweat bead on your forehead as you turn the temperature dial to "toast," and the timer dial to "something slightly closer to light than to dark." This is the moment of truth. Will you make toast, or will this Adventure in Cooking end before it's even begun!?
5. Wipe your brow. You made toast! Now it's time to up the ante and make avocado toast. 
6. Take the mashed avocado and spread it on the bread.
7. Sprinkle the avocado with salt, top it with sliced tomatoes and arugula, and dig in!
8. NO WAIT! You're a Millennial! Instagram the shit out of it first!

I used a Hudson filter, with a dash of cropping.

If you're good at math, you noticed that the recipe only calls for half an avocado, so I made it twice. The second time, I even put some cheese on top, because I was feeling extra.

Another Adventure in Cooking, successfully survived.

Adventures in Cooking: Peanut Butter Pi

Happy Pi Day! Once a year, on March 14, I put on my chef's hat and pretend I know how to make pie. This is mainly so I can show off my Pi Day masterpiece on social media, because everyone else does it. But I'll share a secret with you—I don't actually know how to make pie!

What I do know, is how to have grand Adventures in Cooking! This year's Adventure will take us into the depths of the kitchen, to use two of the best ingredients ever invented—cream cheese and peanut butter.

Please enjoy this peanut butter pi recipe!

Ingredients

4 oz. cream cheese
1 c. confectioner's sugar
1/3 c. peanut butter
1 c. whipped topping (semi-optional)
1 9-inch graham cracker crust

Steps

1. Whip cream cheese until light and fluffy. There is a lot of room for interpretation in this statement, but I take it to mean you should use an electric mixer. You should probably have a brand new hand mixer for this purpose, particularly one that likes to fling tiny particles of food all over your kitchen.
2. Beat in sugar and peanut butter. The addition of sugar will make the batter extremely dry, resulting in even more food particles flying everywhere! Wheee!
3. Fold whipped topping into peanut butter mixture. If you don't have whipped topping, don't worry; it's not like it's an essential part of the recipe or anything!
4. Since you don't have whipped topping, the batter will still be extremely dry and crumbly at this point. To help it soften up, add a hearty dollop of more peanut butter.
5. More peanut butter is not enough to liquify this recipe! Add an arbitrary amount of more cream cheese, until the mixture is soft enough to hold together.
6. By now, you should realize that you don't have a 9-inch graham cracker crust. That's the kind of thing that people who know how to make pie have around, and you are none such person! That's OK, though, because a graham cracker crust is basically just graham crackers and some other things, right? You can make one from scratch.
7. Start with four graham crackers. Crush them into crumbs with a rolling pin and pour them into a bowl. Make sure it's one of those bowls that gets blazingly hot in the microwave—this will be important later.
8. Add 2 teaspoons (or thereabouts) of sugar to the graham cracker crumbs.
9. A graham cracker crust needs something to hold it together, and that something is butter! Since you're just guessing at quantities by this point, grab a couple of those foil-wrapped pats of butter you get at restaurants (you do save those, right?) and dump them into the mix.
10. Microwave the mixture to melt the butter. Cook it in 30-second intervals until you get bored and the bowl has reached the temperature of lava, but the butter is still not melted.
11. Remove the still-solid butter from the bowl and place it in one of your measuring cups instead. Try microwaving it again, this time succeeding in melting it.
12. Mix the butter into the graham cracker mixture. 
13. This is not enough butter, so then add in a melted blob of butter that you took home with the bread from Cheesecake Factory. Waste not, want not!
14. Dump the the graham cracker mixture into two 5.5-inch pie tins, gingerly pressing it into the sides. Since you didn't use enough butter (even with the help of the Cheesecake Factory), it barely sticks to the sides, but that's OK. It will stick to your ooey-gooey pie filling.
15. Divide the pie filling into two portions, and dump each portion into a prepared pie crust.
16. Carefully press down the filling until it covers the crust, and you're done!
17. That is, unless you want to turn your peanut butter pie into peanut butter pi! In that case, you should use some chocolate chips to make the pi symbol on the top of your crust.
18. Refrigerate for a few hours, until the texture turns rather like cookie dough. Eat straight from the pan like some kind of heathen. Makes one 8-to-9-inch pie, two 5.5-inch pies, or 2.828 3.14-inch pies.

I actually had to do a lot of geometry to figure out if two 5.5-inch pies are equivalent to a 9-incher (they're not, but it works because I modified the recipe so much!), so let's all give 3.14 cheers to the number that made this Adventure in Cooking! possible!

Pista-chia pudding

Have you heard of chia pudding? I hadn't, until sometime early last year when I read a diary online, in which the vegetarian (or mostly) author ate chia pudding every day for breakfast. By the third day, I was like, "What the heck is chia pudding?"

Chia seeds, I knew. Chia seeds are the magic behind Chia Pets, which were something of a fad when I was very young. Later on in my life, when the populace got bored of making tacky home decor out of chia seeds, they started using them for eating. Chia seeds experienced a big boom in popularity while I was working at the organic market, so I became somewhat familiar with their properties.  They are oft touted as a superfood fit to provide every kind of health benefit under the sun, but I never really saw enough worthy qualities to make an effort to work them into my diet.

Until I learned about chia pudding, that is. Once I realized that chia seeds can form the basis for a satisfying vegetarian breakfast, I was intrigued. A quick search yielded hundreds of recipes. It was overwhelming, but I quickly learned that the basis of a chia pudding is nothing more than chia seeds and non-dairy milk. You mean, chia pudding will help me get rid of the multitude of expired soy milk cartons in the back of my pantry? Sign me up!

And so, I hopped on the chia train. Over the past year, I have played around with various chia pudding recipes, and it's time to share my findings with the world! Although there are many ways to make chia pudding, the best way is always an  Adventure in Cooking! with a clever portmanteau for a title! Come join me!

You will need:

• 2 Tbsp chia seeds
  Of course, there must be a story behind your chia seeds. The story behind yours is that your original supply of chia was a small bag from the bulk department at the organic market. Then, after trying chia pudding one time, your boyfriend became obsessed with it and used up the remaining chia seeds in no time flat. When it came time to replenish the supply, you cautioned him that a little chia goes a long way, but because your boyfriend is your boyfriend, he insisted on buying the 2-pound bag from Costco, and then promptly lost interest in ever making chia pudding again. You now have a whole ton of chia seeds to use up, so I really hope you like this recipe!
• 1 c. non-dairy milk
  You can use any kind of non-dairy milk for this purpose, but I recommend acquiring a a 24-pack of single serve soymilk cartons as a gift and then only drinking two of them over the course of a year. By this point, you will have a 22-pack of soymilks that are already expired, which should give you ample motivation to perfect the art of chia-pudding-making. Bonus if you can manage to string out the learning process over the course of another year, ensuring you will still have some dubiously safe soymilks remaining to use for demonstration when you finally share your recipes.
• 1 packet instant pistachio pudding
  The story behind your pudding is thus: One day, you go to the grocery store to get a few items that you need...but there's a twist: You're hungry. That pistachio pudding is definitely not on your list, but it looks so yummy...and it's only 80 cents! You buy it. Once home and well fed, you remember that instant pudding is actually kind of gross, and you fail to do anything with the pudding mix for several months. Then you get the idea to use it as flavoring for your world-famous chia pudding, and suddenly all is right with the world again!

How to make it

1. Pour half of the soymilk into a sealable container. A good choice of container is the little 1-pint clear plastic tubs that Chinese restaurants use for carry-out soup.
2. Scoop the chia seeds into the container.
3. Pour the remaining soymilk over the chia seeds. Normally this finicky half-of-this-then-half-of-that-then-the-other-half-of-this nonsense is something that a good Adventurous Cook would just skip, opting instead to dump everything in all at the same time. But for chia pudding, this division of steps is actually important, because the chia seeds are so sticky. If you put them in first, they will clump together at the bottom of the carton and fail to gel. If you put them in last, they will clump at the top, to much the same effect. For best results, you must get most of them wet before they make contact with the edge of the container.
4. Carefully measure out something that looks like it might be one third of the pudding packet, and dump it into the container. This is a total shot in the dark, because you have no idea how much pistachio pudding mix will flavor a one-cup plus-two-tablespoons chia pudding, but since one packet of pudding is supposed to mix with 2 cups of milk, a little under one-half the packet sounds good enough.
5. Now for the fun part. Put the lid on your Chinese takeout container and shake vigorously. This becomes especially fun when the Chinese restaurant kindly decided to vent the container by poking a pinhole into the lid. Hello, soymilk fountain!
6. When the chia pudding is thoroughly mixed, put it in the fridge to soak and set. You should leave it for at least six hours.When that time is up, your pudding will be ready to eat!

Mmmmm....appetizing!

How did it turn out? Well, my pista-chia pudding might look like alien excrement, but it's actually pretty tasty! I worried that chia plus regular pudding might make the mixture too thick, but it came out an excellent consistency. I am never sure how much to sweeten my chia puddings. My soymilk is pre-sweetened, but the addition of the chia seeds can make it a little too bland, so I often add a sweetener. In this case, the pistachio pudding was the sweetener! It might border on a little too sweet, in fact, for a healthy breakfast. So whenever I finally run out of soymilk cartons (I'm down to 3!) I will try it with an unsweetened milk.

Bean Pucks and Nearly Nachos

I do not like to cook. While I do enjoy baking up desserts for special occasions, I find the preparation of daily meals to be a drag (and, on the rare occasion I do it, usually an Adventure in Cooking). Not liking to cook is not really a handicap in this modern age, but something else is: being stingy. I am, and this basically means that I can't just indulge my laziness by ordering from Seamless like all the other Millennials. I have to be prepared, at all times, with a stockpile of frozen dinners and leftovers from the last time I dined out.

Sadly, though, two weeks ago, my refrigerator went kaput, defrosting all of my frozen ravioli, mozzarella sticks, vegetarian burgers, and the other usual staples of my heat-and-eat diet. Fortunately, I was able to keep the large bag of shredded cheddar, because I figured that would get moldy if it were going to go bad, and I didn't see any mold on it yet! But one can't live on cheddar alone. Being out of practice in the art of food shopping (I mainly rely on my boyfriend's Costco membership to supply me with all my daily needs), all I could think to do was pick up a can of refried beans when I happened to be at Wegman's the day after the disaster. I also picked up some corn nuts, because that was a really exciting thing I found in the bulk bins!

Last week, since those refried beans were fresh in my mind and since I basically didn't have anything else to eat at home, they became the basis of my meal in very short order. Now, I have to say, the dish that I'm about to share with you is one that I've been making in some variation or other for years, so it is no longer an Adventure in Cooking! when I prepare it. But since it is a recipe of sorts, I'll categorize it as such, since I don't have a blog tag for "Recipes I'm actually pretty good at making."

How to prepare Nearly Nachos

1. Start with a can of refried beans. Scoop about 1/3 cup of them into a microwave-safe bowl.
2. Top the beans with a solid handful of shredded cheddar cheese. If your cheese, like mine, has been frozen, fully thawed, then popped back into the freezer, it's probably going to be more of a brick of cheese than anything, so bang the bag on the counter a few times before commencing with the sprinkling. Make sure the cheese covers the beans completely, because the beans will explode everywhere without a protective coating of cheese.
3. Microwave the beans and cheese for 77 seconds. Time is always of the essence, and by choosing a time that you can enter with just two presses of the same button, you can save at least a few milliseconds!
4. In my goal to make my Nearly Nachos as close to the real thing (that is, something that I can find in a perhaps-not-too-authentic Mexican restaurant) as possible, I like to eat them with a bit of lettuce. This means ripping a few leaves off a head of romaine, and eating them as a side dish.
   
   Now comes the fun part—the toppings!
5. Get out a packet of Taco Bell mild sauce. You should always have a few of those around—grab one every time you visit a Taco Bell, and you will never lack for seasonings for your Nearly Nachos. Squeeze that sauce over the top of your beans & cheese.

6. If the beans aren't salty enough, you might want to add a dash of seasoned salt. I like to use the "Kartöflukrydd" seasoning that we picked up in Iceland. Nothing says "Mexican food" like an Icelandic seasoned salt! If you're smart and have sampled the beans before coating them with cheese, you might actually mix the seasoning in as a first step, rather than sprinkling it on top of the already salty cheese.
7. Next, if you have them, drop in a few black olives! Black olives aren't a regular fixture in Mexican food, but when I do find them, they make my day, and I always have a can of them at the ready.
8. As a condiment, you may want to add a dollop of plain yogurt. This is a cheaper and healthier alternative to sour cream. I usually put the yogurt on a side plate, say, next to my leaves of lettuce, for dipping into, so it doesn't curdle next to the hot foods.
   
   An alternative way of preparing all of these ingredients is to actually pile them onto tortilla chips and toast them in the toaster oven, in which case you'd have real nachos. But pay close attention to this next step—it's what turns this bowl of ordinary bean dip into Nearly Nachos!
   
9. Since I frequently do not have tortilla chips, I usually make do with what I have—which is either a bag of tortilla-chip crumbs that my boyfriend left behind after eating all the chips and subsequently forgetting about it, or a bag of pretzels (which I usually got from an airplane, because I never buy pretzels but do accept them when they are given to me for free). You'd be surprised at how well pretzels can substitute for tortilla chips!
   
   In this example, I'll be using pretzels, because I happen to have a bag of snack mix with pretzels in it. Ordinarily I'd just throw away the pretzels, but waste not, want not! If I can find an application for pretzels that does not require eating them plain, I'll be happy to keep them around! We're at the bottom of this snack bag by now, so finding a whole unbroken pretzel is a bit of a challenge. But that's actually perfect for Nearly Nachos, because you can just sprinkle the pretzel pieces onto the top of the whole shebang. Go ahead! Do it!
10. Now you're finished! This whole process takes approximately two minutes, perfect for anyone who hates wasting time in the kitchen. Grab a spoon and commence eating! Don't forget to dip each spoonful into the yogurt, and top off each with a bite of lettuce! Yum!

Sorry, folks. I lied. You're not actually finished. 

After you have eaten your delicious dinner for one, you will undoubtedly have some refried beans left over. If you're anything like me, you can't work your way through a can of refried beans before it starts growing mold. The solution is bean pucks! Basically, these are single-serving portions of refried beans that you stash in the freezer until you're ready to eat them.

This is how I make them.

How to prepare Bean Pucks

1. Take a small muffin tin (one can of beans will probably yield no more than 5 bean pucks) and spray the inside of each cup with cooking spray.
2. Then fill the cups to the top with refried beans. Simple!
3. Place the muffin tin in the freezer, and a few hours later, you will have a tin full of bean pucks.

If you let them thaw just slightly, they should fall easily out of the muffin tin. My tin is so flimsy, I can actually squeeze them out from the bottom, but that's leaving dents in it, so I don't recommend that method to those who respect their kitchen equipment. Return your now-liberated bean pucks to the freezer in a container of your choosing.

The next time you're hungry for Mexican food, just grab a bean puck from the freezer, thaw it by microwaving it for around 44 seconds, then spread it out in the bowl and fix yourself some Nearly Nachos!