Recipe Mutiny steals recipes from food blogs and recipe sites. Then we publish them. With credit (Naturally).
Weekend breakfasts are a big deal around our house. We don’t get too crazy or complicated, but we do like to slow down and hang out in our pajamas a little longer than usual—especially around a stack of pancakes.
After a week of oatmeal or smoothies consumed on the way out the door (or at the desk), pancakes always feel extra special.
Continue reading "Chocolate Chip Pancakes with Raspberry Sauce" »
This month, Megan Gordon is here to give us a look at what meal planning looks like for her family! Megan is a writer and recipe developer living in Seattle, WA, the author of Whole Grain Mornings, and mom to a 2-year-old. Please welcome Megan!
If you’re anything like me, you may find yourself falling into a rut of repetitive cooking in the weeks (and even months) after the holiday season.
Right now, I’m burned out from hosting, and I’m feeling uninspired by the cabbage and Brussels sprouts at the store (any fresh fruits and produce are pretty limited here in Seattle). It’s been all too easy to fall back on easy family favorites and stay in our cooking comfort zone.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, of course! But I am always trying to get our son to try new foods so he’ll remain interested in new flavors and tastes.
Continue reading "Meal Plan for February Week 2" »
For those who celebrate Valentine’s Day, there are generally two schools of style: the cutesy and the eleganza. If heart-shaped everything and a candy-pink palette isn’t your jam, consider a sophisticated—but not necessarily fussy—dinner or dessert (or both) inspired by precious gems.
Taking your culinary cues from the rich colors and glossy luster of jewels is certainly more wallet-friendly than buying expensive baubles, but there’s nothing cheap about the look or taste of these delicacies. And you don’t have to go literal and make hard candy gemstones, either. Once you begin to look at produce and preserves and the rest of the food world with an eye to striking gold (or rubies, or emeralds…), you start to see an endless array of beautiful possibilities.
Jewel Tones
Beet Carpaccio by Perpetually Chic
Your grocery store is a treasure trove: beets, both garnet and golden; ruby-veined radicchio and treviso; deep emerald spinach; bright peridot-green pistachios; glistening carnelian beads of salmon roe; glossy red Amarena cherries; shining citrus, especially red grapefruit and stunning blood oranges; ruby pips of pomegranate seeds; rainbow chard; certain dried fruits like cranberries and golden raisins; deep purple potatoes; sunstone-colored membrillo (quince paste, perfect with salty cheese); softly luminous thinly shaved cured meats like prosciutto and Serrano ham, or smoked salmon (bonus points for beet-cured gravlax); glowing topaz honey or apricot jam—these are all outstanding ingredients in and of themselves that require minimal or no processing to bring out their best gem-like qualities.
Beet Glazed Salmon by Bird and Cleaver
Make them the star of a dish by setting them among simple, more neutral accompaniments; think restrained salads, cheese-topped toasts or crostini, and minimalist cocktails. This makes it possible to highlight a single beautiful ingredient or to jumble several together for a jewelry box effect—a salad composed of a single kind of leaf, scattered with supremed citrus segments, pistachios, and roasted beets, or reserved but gorgeous little toasts with brie and golden mounds of kumquat marmalade.
Shining, Shimmering, Splendid
Dark Chocolate Pomegranate Fudge Tart by How Sweet Eats
Some of the ingredients mentioned above definitely fall into this category too, but think about what techniques you can apply to more ho-hum tidbits to literally make them shine. Glaze fruit in a simple syrup—it makes for a lovely glistening aspect, and has the bonus of making pallid winter strawberries and other out-of-season fruits taste much better; add additional flavorings to your syrup if you want, like vanilla beans or cardamom. Along the same lines, you can use superfine sugar to frost fresh fruit, from cranberries to blackberries to grapes. Gelatin can capture bright yet translucent colors with high shine. (If you instinctively recoil at the thought of Jell-O, remember that the inherently fancy French have been doing aspic and gelée forever.) Unflavored gelatin can also give you impressive mirror glaze results on mousse cakes, in any gemstone shade you desire, from ruby red to sapphire blue. Candy kumquats and they turn to polished citrine. Make red wine poached pears and they glow.
Homemade Kumquat Marmalade with Brie by White on Rice Couple
On the savory side, go for sticky, shiny glazes on your main protein, whether meat, poultry, or seafood (or veggies, tofu, etc. for that matter), made from red wine and/or cherries, blueberries, redcurrant jelly, or blackberry preserves, or go golden with honey and apricots. Luminous mixed-fruit chutney also works beautifully with various proteins. Or make a bright emerald-green oil-and-herb sauce (pesto or chimichurri) to spark shrimp, steak, roasted vegetables, or whatever else you like. Consider serving your main course over rice, quinoa, or couscous pilaf studded with dried fruit and nuts, or vibrant steamed greens with pops of contrasting color from pomegranate seeds or golden beet slivers scattered about.
Gold Plated
Gold-Dusted Chocolate Champagne Truffles by The Flavor Bender
Twenty-four karat food comes most obviously in the form of edible gold leaf, which you can sprinkle or smooth on literally everything for a touch of gourmet glitz—or try luster dust, for turning fudge into tiny gold bricks for instance. But you can also pay homage to the precious metal in the form of caramel, from a liquid glaze on a tart or flan to an amber brittle like on the top of crème brûlée. Or represent it with perfectly cooked pastry. Even just-so caramelized scallops or chicken have a reasonably golden hue. You can sort of nod to gold by tingeing dishes with saffron too; use it in risotto, poaching liquid for pale foods that will take on the bright yellow tint, even stir it into easy ice cream.
Diamond Mine
Salted Dark Chocolate Tart by Gimme Some Oven
A liberal coating of sanding sugar can make cookies or truffles look like they’re covered in diamond dust, or large flakes of sea salt can sparkle on the surface of a chocolate tart to evoke a scattering of icy diamond chips.
Another nice thing about cooking in the color palette of fine gems is that it doesn’t have to be Valentine’s-specific. If you think Cupid is stupid and love is the worst, you can throw an especially fabulous anti-Valentine’s Day party to express your esteem for your single self. Or break out the treasure chest ingredients for any grand occasion dinner, no matter where it falls on the calendar. But if you follow this MO for a special someone on the officially sanctioned day of high romance, they will remember and appreciate it always (not to be a downer, but probably even if things don’t ultimately work out).
So use these examples as inspiration, or follow some of the jaw-dropping recipes highlighted here and cook—then eat—your heart out.
Chowhound
Blood orange juice adds a punch of color and extra-zesty flavor to a margarita. If you’re more into amethysts (and traditional Valentine’s Day bubbly), try the dead-simple and beautifully violet Elizabeth Taylor Champagne Cocktail. But if you want something bolder, blood orange is the way to go. Get our Blood Orange Margarita recipe.
Golden Beet and Citrus Salad with Spiced Honey Vinaigrette
Cooking and Beer
This plate pops with brilliant color, and cutting the citrus into faceted shapes highlights their resemblance to edible gemstones even more. Crisp fennel and creamy avocado complement the juicy fruit, and a spiced honey vinaigrette brings it all together. Get the recipe.
Smoky Purple Sweet Potato Soup with Bacon and Chipotle
Viktoria’s Table
Amethyst happens to be the traditional February birthstone, so this is an especially perfect choice for an unexpected Valentine’s Day soup—but if you can’t find purple produce, bright orange sweet potatoes will work just as well and still be stunning. Get the recipe.
Puff Pastry Baked Brie with Fig Jam and Candied Walnuts
Aberdeen’s Kitchen
Golden, flaky pastry plus warm, gooey brie, plus bright, juicy pomegranate seeds and ripe figs? Yes, please! It’s almost too pretty to eat, but really, how could you resist digging in? Oh, and there are candied walnuts too. Get the recipe.
Grilled Salmon with Beet Blood Orange Relish
Heather Christo
Beets are one of the most beautiful roots, not only for their incredibly vibrant hue but their incomparable earthy-sweet taste. Paired with balsamic vinegar and blood oranges, they make an elegant topping for simple grilled salmon that’s sure to win anyone’s heart. Get the recipe.
I Am a Food Blog
Fancy and fun, these mini nuggets of beef tenderloin wrapped in prosciutto, mushroom duxelles, and rich golden pastry may take some time, but are totally worth it. For the vegan and vegetarian sophisticates, there are delightful beet Wellingtons, but for the rest of us, a ruby center can be achieved by properly cooking these meaty little parcels of love. Get the recipe.
Sugar and Cloth
Dessert could be as beautifully simple as a scoop of luscious ice cream topped with edible gems of kumquat spoon fruit and their syrup, or chocolate mendiants, but if you’re up for a bit of a project, make macarons in a mix of jewel tones with the addition of shiny gold leaf. They may not last as long as actual jewelry, but they’re way more thoughtful (and tastier too). Get the recipe.
Alana Jones-Mann
You could probably even get away with just buying fancy chocolates (or make them yourself in this gem-faceted mold to fit the theme!), but if you intend to really wow, these crazy-amazing gemstone cupcakes cannot be beat. Get the recipe.
Tucked beneath the facade of an old menswear store, Epic Spices is unassuming at first glance. Step through the little corridor between diagrams of posters (featuring figs, cloves, and pepper), and bowls of ground spices, and you will begin to understand that you have come to Chicago’s mecca for high-quality and hard-to-find spices. The dill weed is greener, the ginger smells fresher, and all the shelves have jars marked “tester” for pre-purchase tasting of the different spices and blends. And if trying the various spices for yourself isn’t enough, the shop’s owners have suggestions and advice at-the-ready for all of your flavor-enhancing needs.
With extensive backgrounds in the food and spice industry, Steven Tobiason and Natalie Haliziw opened Epic Spices in 2012; though, they did not initially plan for it to be a retail store, but instead a wholesale pepper business. “The original incarnation of Epic Spices was a high-end pepper importer, and processor, and distributor,” explains Tobiason. “You know what every restaurant uses? Pepper!”
It turns out businesses weren’t so keen on getting only pepper at one distributor, and all their other spices elsewhere. As a reaction to this, Tobiason and Haliziw began adding a few other items, and opened up their store to the public. Soon, they were taking customer requests, and their product variety grew further with customers asking for blends like merkén—a combination of roasted cacho de cabra chile, cracked coriander, cumin, salt, a little sunflower oil—after returning from a trip to Chile. Warm and spicy flavors in this blend, along with guidance from this recipe for Camarones al Pil Pil with Merkén (scroll to the bottom), will introduce your shrimp to some Chilean heat.
Some of these requests even earned the requestor a place of honor on the spice jar label. Back when Epic Spices only offered 15 or 16 products, “if [customers] asked for a blend and it came out good enough for sale to others, whoever asked for it could have their name, or the name of their choosing, immortalized on the label,” Tobiason states. This is why you can find Raphaela’s Garlic Pepper and Madeleine’s Cookie Sprinkle, named for a mother and daughter, on display for purchase, as well as Clarence’s Crazy Hot Seasoning and Chloe’s Garam Masala. If you elect to try Chloe’s blend, you might consider applying it to our Curried Cauliflower, Chickpeas, and Tofu recipe, which also incorporates fennel seeds, turmeric, and cayenne pepper.
“The personal relationships that we get to develop here are almost as fun as the whole spice game,” explains Tobiason, as one of the shop’s loyal customers drops by with a variety of homemade marshmallows for Tobiason and Haliziw to try—created using their own peppermint extract and matcha. Haliziw notes that they often get to sample customers’ creations in the form of treats like these marshmallows, or cookies, or other baked goods. Try out matcha in your own baking endeavors with our Raspberry Matcha Muffins recipe.
And what goes into the excellent products at Epic Spices? For one, the owners keep as close to the source as possible. The more people involved, the more expensive things get—so, they do all the grinding and processing and packaging themselves, in-house. In this way, they’re able to offer things like ceylon cinnamon, which would lose all its flavor by the time it would reach the consumer of a typical grocery store, because they get fresh cinnamon bark and process it on-the-fly for their customers. Ceylon cinnamon has a subtly spicy and woody flavor that nicely tops desserts like our Rice Pudding.
Reacting to the market adds to Epic Spice’s ever-evolving stock of flavors, whether it be directly through customer asks or from the influence of impressive industry figures. Whenever renowned chef Yotam Ottolenghi comes out with a new book, they are prepared to carry these recipe-specific spices that you just cannot find at other stores: vadouvan (a French-inspired curry with shallots), shichimi togarashi (inspired from the owners’ travels to Tokyo), and baharat, for example. For some tips on using baharat, (as well as za’atar and ras el hanout), check out our guide for infusing meals with Middle Eastern flavors.
Tobiason and Haliziw also test everything comprehensively, like when they made meal after meal of jerk chicken in a journey to develop the perfect jerk seasoning. And then there was the time they had a customer request for chaat masala, so they experimented with different blends until they landed on one utilizing slightly-sulfurous kala namak. Regarding some of the more pungent flavors involved in these trials, Haliziw adds that “Asafoetida is another fun one—it just reminds me of the time I left a pineapple on the counter for way too long.” And yet, asafoetida and chaat masala can work harmoniously in this unexpected recipe for Chaat Masala Fruit Salad.
On top of it all, Epic Spices maintains affordable prices. “One of the reasons we keep our price point as low as it is, is to not exclude anyone from a delicious meal. Eating well should not be so elitist,” declares Tobiason. With most of their spices ringing up at only a few dollars each, a well-stocked spice cabinet is attainable for any of their customers.
These are all reasons why their spices are pervasive in the food and drink establishments of Chicago. If you eat out in this city, there’s a good chance you’ve enjoyed a meal or a drink made with their products. “We’ve been very fortunate because we’ve never advertised—we suck at marketing,” admits Tobiason, with Haliziw adding that “there are so many restaurants in the city of Chicago, the wholesale is mostly local.”
Even if you’re more into the bar scene, you’ve likely enjoyed a concoction made with flavors from Epic Spices. “Forbidden Root gets quite a lot of stuff from us for their botanical brews,” mentions Tobiason, and adds that Goose Island will experiment using their spices before committing to a particular concoction for their own customers. They have supplied to Pipeworks Brewing, and other breweries, too.
With endless possibilities for new blends, there’s always something new to try in-store. “We can make a million new things everyday just based on what we have now,” explains Tobiason. And all these wonderful flavors came about because, he notes, “I no longer was good at anything other than this, and Natalie was really into the idea of working 75 hours a week instead of 40.”
If you grab lunch on the go often, you’ve probably come to rely on build-your-own-meal places like Chipotle and Qdoba. With more than 3,000 locations between the two chains (Chipotle, with 2,250, has the larger presence), the eateries are churning out tons of tacos, burritos, and bowls for the masses day after day. But does one beat out the other when it comes to your dietary needs? And is one better for you than the other? Here’s what experts had to say.
Meatless Options
When it comes to their meat selections, Chipotle and Qdoba both offer a variety of options that come in at similar calorie counts, says Toby Amidor, M.S., R.D., nutrition expert and author of “The Healthy Meal Prep Cookbook.” (For example, both offer chicken that comes in at a range of 170-180 calories per serving.) But Qdoba pulls ahead when it comes to having two offerings for non-meat eaters, with eggs and roasted fire shrimp as additional options for vegetarians and pescatarians, while Chipotle just has one (organic tofu) available to add to meals, Amidor says.
Sides
It’s pretty much a draw when it comes to the two restaurants’ add-ons, says Amidor. “Chips in general will set you back in both places around 600 calories,” she says. “However, Chipotle has the large option and unless you’re splitting it with several people, it can pack on the calories quickly.” If your heart is set on a side, your best bet at both locations is going for chips with salsa (tomatillo-red chili salsa at Chipotle and salsa verde at Qdoba), according to Amidor, though she warns that both still have a pretty high sodium count.
Tortillas
If tortillas are your thing, then the best chain will depend on what you’re going for. Want a whole wheat tortilla? Then Qdoba’s will help you shave off roughly 30 calories compared to the regular option, while also giving you some protein and fiber, says Lauren Harris-Pincus, M.S., R.D.N., author of “The Protein-Packed Breakfast Club.” Just want the lowest calorie option? Then you should opt for Chipotle’s crispy corn shells, with three clocking in at 180 calories total. But foregoing tortillas completely is probably the best bet if you’re trying to shed some pounds, according to Harris-Pincus. “If you are trying to manage the total calories in the meal, forego the tortillas and stick with a salad or bowl with protein, beans, brown rice, and veggies,” she says.
Ingredients
Though Qdoba boasts a slew of fresh foods at its locations, Chipotle comes out on top when it comes to where it sources its ingredients, says nutritionist, personal trainer, and health and wellness coach Jamie Logie of Regained Wellness. “Chipotle appears to be ahead of [Qdoba] healthwise in that their meats are naturally raised and free of hormones or antibiotics,” Logie says. “They don’t use foods containing GMOs and get their produce from smaller farms. Qdoba makes note of them using fresh ingredients but that seems to be as far as it goes and they don’t take the stand Chipotle does as far as talking about sustainable farming, healthy soils, and pigs being allowed to roam freely [and so on].”
Meal Planning
Though both Qdoba and Chipotle offer nutrition information online, the latter makes it way easier to plan ahead, whether you’ve got a dietary restriction or are on a strict eating plan. “Chipotle’s website allows you to easily build your meal and adds all the calories and other nutrient info for each ingredient automatically,” Harris-Pincus says. “It’s far superior to Qdoba’s interface for those attempting to track the nutritional value of their meal.” Amidor recommends tallying up your order before heading to either chain so you know what you’re getting calorie-wise, as well as the amount of sodium you’re consuming.
Trying to figure out what to order at either chain that would be best for you? “In either case, the healthiest options, in my opinion, are going for a [bowl] so you’re avoiding any wheat from the tortillas or taco shells,” says Logie. He recommends going for brown rice, chicken (or another protein if you’re a vegetarian), a good amount of lettuce, salsa, corn, and beans, and maybe a bit of cheese. “If you want to keep fat down, I would skip the sour cream,” he says. “[You] can get some healthy fats from the [guacamole], but that’s going to bump the calories up. I would skip the chips as these can ruin the healthy meal with it’s higher calorie, carb, fat, and sodium content.”
For more tips, tricks, and healthy recipes, check out our healthy living page.
