Cilantro Fest 2011, Night 1

I love summer.  Beaches, margaritas, and CILANTRO!!!  I definitely associate the taste of cilantro with summer time - it makes me think of the free chips and salsa that come with a pitcher of margaritas at Noche Mexicana, my FAVORITE Mexican place (why anyone would go to Blockheads on Columbus and 108 is beyond me...so much good Mexican in my 'hood, including Noche Mexicana just down the block, yet gross Blockheads is always packed.)  Anyways, as my good friend Meg pointed out, the only problem with cilantro is you don't typically need a ton of it, yet the store always sells it in HUGE bunches.  So tonight is night one of Cilantro Fest 2011.  I took a recipe straight from the pages of Real Simple and made a delicious chickpea and raisin salad.  I followed the directions exactly and it was really good and easy, but next time I'm going to embellish a bit and add some diced red onion, another one of my favorite flavors!  Forgive me for simply copying and pasting, but hey, its just as simple as it sounds!

Ingredients

• 1 cup raisins
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 3 15.5-ounce cans chickpeas, rinsed
• 1 cup fresh cilantro or flat-leaf parsley leaves
• 4 scallions, thinly sliced
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• kosher salt and black pepper

Directions

1. In a small saucepan, combine the raisins, vinegar, and sugar and bring just to a simmer; remove from heat and let cool.
2. In a large bowl, toss the chickpeas, cilantro, scallions, and raisin mixture with the oil, cumin, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper.

One slight deviation from the recipe:  I used golden raisins.  Not nearly as attractive, but it's what I had in the cupboard and the taste was just as it should have been.  Also, I dropped a chickpea on the floor and Lyla played with it for approximately one hour.  SO CUTE!

Success #2: Scrimps Tacos!

I have a serious obsession with seafood-based tacos.  On a recent trip to Puerto Rico with some friends, one of our stated goals from the start was to eat some delicioso fish tacos.  While we never found any, we ate tons of delicious meals and one night, we ended up at a roadside restaurant where no one spoke English and our cab driver ordered us each a whole fish.

I had never actually eaten a whole intact fish before, but it was seriously delicious.  The best thing about the whole experience was how bare-bones everything was - not a ton of dressings or spices or garnishes, just a lot of real deliciousness.

So last night after spin class with Ellie I decided I was craving tacos.  I was tempted to stop at one of the millions of Mexican restaurants between the cycling studio and my apartment (no joke, despite the fact that it is  2 blocks from my apartment to UWS Cycling). Instead I headed to Garden of Eden to buy some ingredients.  Keeping in mind the last significant taco-related conquest (i.e. Puerto Rico), I decided to make seafood tacos.  Since I had no idea what fish to use, I went with shrimp - quick, easy, summery, and hard to screw up.  Based on intuition, I grabbed half a pound of shrimp, an onion, some cilantro, and some corn tortillas.  After consulting a few random recipes on my blackberry, I added some chipotle peppers in adobo sauce and headed home.

Success #1: The Zone of Proximal Development

I teach high school at a public charter school in NYC.  Though the school is generally a miserable place to be, I have honestly been blessed with some of the most amazing students a teacher could ever ask for.  They are consistently kind, funny, inquisitive, passionate, and intelligent little people (not literally) who make me smile on even the shittiest of days.  What I have been constantly amazed by is their abillity to push themselves to absorb and understand new content and ideas(or, as is sometimes the case, their ability to let me trick them into pushing themselves). 

Which brings to mind a classic educational philosophy term coined by Vygotsky: The Zone of Proximal Development, or ZPD.  As Wikipedia so nobly states, the ZPD is "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers;" or, to state it another way, ZPD is "is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help."  Basically, its the point at which a student is challenged in a way that forces him/her to use skills/thought processes s/he has while simultaneously gaining new ones, deepening them, etc.  If you do Sudoku or crosswords, you are totally familiar with the idea of a ZPD: its when the puzzle is just hard enough that you struggle a bit, but you want to keep going and solve it. 

Optimally, as teachers, our students will spend most of their time "in the zone."  As a chef, anything besides toast puts me in the zone.  But one of my first real successes was the true definition of being in the ZPD: Skillet Gnocchi with Chard & White Beans.  (Adapted slightly from Eating Well.  I've copied the recipe here with slight adjustments and follow with my notes.)

The Origin of Species

Hello to the one (maybe two) people who are reading this!  Like many of my peers, I am in my late 20s and stuck in a job I hate with very little hope of getting out anytime soon, thanks to a shitty job market (thanks W!)  So in an effort to stave off the sense of impending doom that greets me each day when my alarm goes off, I am attempting to solve the mystery of that old adage about life giving you lemons and ending up with lemonade.  You see, I wouldn't know the first thing about turning lemons into lemonade, because I suck at cooking, baking, mixing, stirring - basically, all things culinary-related.

There are a few things I make really well - namely homemade pizza and fruit salad (yummy yummy).  After that, there's nothing doing in my kitchen except the occasional stinky disaster that even my wonderful puppy won't eat, calls for take-out, and oven-baked Amy's Organic burritos (yes, I don't own a microwave). I recently signed on with an awesome wellness coach-in-training who needed a practice client, and one weekly goal that kept popping up in various incarnations was "I will make at least one home cooked meal."  In the three weeks I have been working with her, I have had two wins and one EPIC FAIL, which made me think "hey, maybe I can actually do this...maybe I can learn to cook!"  But before I get into the successes, let's talk about the EPIC FAIL, which is where this blog gets its name.