Hey, Ho! Chorizo!

I know we've been a little quiet over here at 2 Hungry Hearts, but we've been trying to unpack and dig ourselves out from underneath all these moving boxes.  We managed to tackle the kitchen first, and make enough space so that we could start cooking again.  Fortunately the timing worked out pretty well since we're in between CSA share seasons, and have another couple weeks before the Fall CSA starts up.

To christen our new kitchen, we decided to whip up a quick and easy frittata.  Frittatas are a great way to clean out the fridge and use up those little bits of veggies that you have left in your fridge.  We went with a Spanish-inspired frittata, filling ours with chorizo, kale and manchego cheese.  To compliment the frittata, we made some purple potato homefries and a simple salad.

We got the potatoes going first, dicing them up along with some onions and garlic.  You can throw them all in the pan together and let them cook up.  It will take a little while for the potatoes to get crisp on the outside, so you'll want to start these first.  We cooked ours in a little olive oil, and added some salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and some smoked paprika, which paired quite nicely with the chorizo.

So while your potatoes are cooking, you can get to work on the frittata.  It's best to use a pan that you can also stick in the oven.  We started by browning up our chorizo.

Once that was cooked, we removed the meat from the pan, poured out some of the excess grease, and then tossed in our kale.

While the kale was sauteing, I whipped up about 7 eggs and grated in some manchego cheese.  As soon as the kale was wilted, we added the chorizo back in, and added the egg mixture.  Once the eggs have set in the bottom of the pan, you'll want to pop the whole pan into the oven.  The twist here was that we added some sliced tomatoes on top and let them roast in the oven, along with some extra cheese!

After about 8 minutes, our frittata was cooked through, and we were ready to eat!

The smokiness of the chorizo was balanced out nicely by the acidity of the roasted tomato.  It was a quick and easy meal that would also make an excellent brunch item.

Cheat Day Brunch

Since we lost an hour of sleep last night, we ended up sleeping in a little later than planned.  It was too late for breakfast, but we weren't ready for lunch quite yet, so we decided to make a fantastic brunch right at home.  You know how us DCers love our brunch!  With our new Paleo diet, we designated Sundays as our cheat day.  We didn't stray too far from it for brunch, but there were definitely a few ingredients you wouldn't find in the typical Paleo plan...ricotta, parmesan, flour.  We started our day with a frittata, filled with greens and bacon, and some apple pancakes, which were more apple than pancake.

We first got to work on the frittata by cooking up some bacon.  Once it was nice and crispy, we took it out of the pan, so we could cook up the other ingredients in the rendered fat.  The extra fat that we didn't need at the moment, went into a dish nearby, to be added back in later.

Next, it was time to saute the shallots in some of that bacon fat.  Once those were softened, we tossed in the greens.  We didn't want to use all of our kale, so we used a bit of kale and a bit of spinach.  These were also cooked up in the bacon fat until they had wilted.

While that was going on, I mixed together the eggs, parmesan, and ricotta.  Once those were thoroughly mixed, we added in half of the bacon, and the cooled greens and shallots.  You don't want to add them to the egg mixture while they're piping hot, otherwise you'll end up with scrambled eggs.  We also added in some black pepper, crushed red pepper flakes, and some dried parsley.

Once everything is mixed together, you'll pour it back into your pan.  Spread the mixture out evenly, and top it with the rest of your bacon and more parmesan cheese.  Once the edges have set, you're ready to throw 'er in the oven to finish baking for about 20 minutes.  When she's done, she'll look like this...

Now, for the pancakes!  I made these while the frittata was baking in the oven.

Start by peeling, coring and slicing your apples into rings.  We used the fuji apple and one of the granny smith apples.  The batter was simple...just some flour, eggs, milk, melted butter, baking powder and cinnamon.  Since we always like to put our own little twist on recipes, we also added in some pumpkin pie spice (since we didn't have any nutmeg on hand), and some chopped pecans.

Once your batter is mixed, just dunk your rings in the batter so they're completely coated, and place them in the pan to cook up.  One thing we learned after the first batch...if you decide to add nuts to the batter, its probably best to spoon them into the hole of your apple rings.  This will allow the apples to sit flat in the pan, and cook up more evenly.

But that's the fun part about cooking...it's all about trial and error, learning as you go, and making adjustments along the way.  That first batch may not have looked the prettiest, but they still tasted pretty darn good!

In the end, we had a delicious brunch.  The frittata was a savory dish, balanced out by the creamy ricotta. While the pancakes were sweet and tart from the apples, which still had a nice crunch to them.  And brunch wouldn't be complete without a bloody mary!  The only thing we were missing was a slice of cantaloupe at the end to make it a complete brunch.

One Hell of a Burger

With spring nearing, and a trip to the beach over Memorial Day weekend, we've decided it's time to whip ourselves into shape.  We both packed on a couple pounds over the winter, so we decided to take action!  I'm a newbie to the whole Paleo diet, and if you're not familiar, here's a simple overview of what you can/can't eat:

courtesy of dearpaleo.com

We already eat pretty well, so it shouldn't be too hard to transition to a slightly stricter Paleo diet.  We're allowing ourselves 1 cheat day a week.  This should help fuel my love of carbs.  

We had already planned on making burgers tonight, so to make it more Paleo friendly, we skipped the bun, and just placed the patty on a bed of bibb lettuce.  When trying to decide what kind of burgers we wanted to make, I thought of one of my favorite burgers in DC...Ray's Hellburger.  Sadly, the place has shuttered, but you can still try their burgers at Ray's to the Third.  Anyway...I'd always get their burger with roasted garlic, and grilled onions and peppers.  So this is an ode to Ray's Hellburger.

We started by roasting a few cloves of garlic...with a drizzle of olive oil, and sprinkle of salt and pepper, just wrap them up in foil and pop 'em in the oven.  An while the garlic roasted up, we also cooked up some sweet potato fries.  The fries got a brushing of olive oil, and a sprinkle of truffle salt, pepper, garlic and parsley.

While the garlic roasted and the fries cooked up, I got to work on the burger patties.  I chopped up a couple cloves of garlic, an mixed that with the ground beef, some truffle salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning.  We kept it really simple.

Since we had some peppers, onions, and mushrooms left over from last week's steak sandwiches, we warmed those up to top our burgers.  They were simply seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper.

As the components cooked up, we started to build the burger.  The burger went on top of the lettuce, we spread the roasted garlic on the burger, and then topped it with our peppers, onions, and mushrooms.

The crowning jewel was the fried egg on top!

The yolk was nice and runny, and since we held off on condiments, it provided a nice "sauce" for everything. An honestly, I didn't miss the bun.  This whole Paleo thing may not be so bad afterall.

Cleaning Out the Fridge

With the holidays approaching and both of us heading out of town soon, we need to clear out the fridge and try to eat our remaining CSA goodies.  We haven't been cooking as much this past week between holiday parties, pop-up tacos (more to come on this soon), and birthday celebrations, so we have quite a bit of food to get through.  So I turned to my trusty friend, Gojee, to see what kinds of recipes he had to offer.

If you haven't heard me say it before, you'll hear it now...I LOVE this website.  You can type in what ingredients you have, things you don't like, things you crave, etc., and it will spit out a slideshow of recipes that meet your criteria.  The main veggies we need to use up are the kale and potatoes.  In those ingredients went into the "I Have" field, and out came 100 recipes.  Since we also have onion (white and green) from the CSA, and some eggs in the fridge, we settled on the Spansh tortilla with kale.

First things first...slice the potatoes.  Here's where I realized having a mandoline would really come in handy. But the box grater worked fine enough.  Once sliced, we layered them into the pan with some olive oil, salt and pepper, to get nice and crispy and brown.

While those were cooking, I sliced half of the white onion, and a few green onions.  We also deribbed the kale.  Is deribbed a word?  If not, it should be.  Once the potatoes were golden brown, we tossed in the onions to sweat them out a bit.  The kale followed shortly thereafter.

While that was all cooking, I beat the eggs...all 3 of them.  Yeah...here's where I should've checked how many eggs we had left before we started cooking.  Lesson learned.  Once the kale was wilted down, we dumped in our eggs, trying to distribute them throughout the big pan.  It only took a few minutes for them to cook up, and we were ready to eat.

To top it off, we threw a dollop of chipotle sour cream on top.  This was leftover from last week's sweet potato latkes.

And since I had a couple oranges, we decided to make a little orange crush cocktail.  I flexed my muscles a bit and squeezed the juice from the 2 oranges.

To that, we added some Aperol, vodka, and fresh mint.

If you like cocktails, and don't have stainless steel straws, you need to get some.  Thank you, Tiffany, for sending me some.  They get so icy cold in your drink, and just enhance your cocktail sipping experience.  Although we were lacking about 4 eggs, it was still a tasty, filling meal.