Banh Mi: Vietnamese Pork Meatball Subs

I saw this pork meatball banh mi recipe in Bon Appetit's January issue and knew I had to make it... banh mi are (is?) basically Vietnamese grinders/hoagies/subs/what have you.

Conveniently, the CSA had the carrots and daikon radishes (which look eerily like my nemesis, the parsnip) that make up the slaw that the recipe uses to compliment the meatballs. Also, it calls for plenty of everybody's favorite spicy sauce, Sriracha.

If you dig on swine, I highly recommend you give this recipe a try... the recipe really made only enough meatballs for 4 sandwiches, but it made a ton of the carrot/daikon slaw, more than necessary.

Wedding Jewels

Chuck wore this multi-colored pearl necklace to a wedding (a wedding for which she braved the great snowpocalypse of Aught Nine):

This swarovski crystal one she'll be wearing on New Year's Eve for yet another wedding:

Broccoli Pesto: Meh

Hmmm... I wanted to like this broccoli pesto. It had all of my favorite stinky foods- broccoli, olives, garlic, goat cheese- yet I was not a fan for some reason. It was kinda thick and overwhelming... not enough variation in texture, perhaps?

Chuck totally wasn't fooled by the fact that the olives were all chopped up, either. She hated it. Oh well.

Pineapple Empanadas

Amy left us with a bevy of hand-me-down food when she departed for sunnny Sydney, including some freshly cut pineapple. Chuck doesn't really care for pineapple, so I tried to find a way to use up the pineapple that she could tolerate. Some empanada-like pastries sounded good...
These empanadas use a cream cheese crust, which was simple and pretty good. For the filling, I mixed the diced pineapple with a little bit of brown sugar... in retrospect, I think it could have used some additional spice- cinnamon? cardamom? I drizzled a basic powdered sugar and milk glaze on them after they came out of the oven.

Cookie Extravaganza, Part Deux

A second Christmas cookie extravaganza, this time in preparation for my office's pot-luck Christmas dessert party.

This time I limited myself to two kinds of cookies, both of which were simple drop cookies, since I was cooking on a weeknight:

1. I resurrected the chewy ginger cookies from the first cookie extravaganza since they were so good.

2. I also tried out these peanut butter blossom cookies, although I substituted milk chocolate chips for the requisite Hershey's kisses.

Mmmmmm!

Curried Lentils with Sweet Potatos and Kale

Chuck made this recipe on her day off. Good flavors, although texturally a little bit of a mushy one-note. SmittenKitchen is definitely right though: not pretty to look at!

I think we're a little tapped out after three days in a row of healthy legumes and grains and such. Nurse, bacon and cheese, stat!

Moroccan-spiced Stuffed Squash

Using this recipe as a basis, I stuffed some delicata squashes with a ground beef and bulgur wheat mixture seasoned with fresh parsley, cinnamon, nutmeg, smoked paprika, minced apricots and toasted pine nuts. Pretty good!
I ate the leftover stuffing the following day for lunch with some pita chips- yum.