Cubicle Cooks

TGI-Fry Day! That’s the name of my new fried food column at Serious Eats. Here’s my debut post about South Slope’s Fried Edam cheese. It is a doozy, so wear your comfy pants!

We totally appreciate Mark Bittman’s easy, breezy recipe style: simple dishes presented with a million variations. In other words, flexible dishes for when you are broke and have disparate pantry items. This morning, we found ourselves with the needed ingredients to make his rice-and-pea soup. Leftover Swanson veggie stock? Check. Frozen peas? Yup! White rice? Indeed. The only ingredient we had to pick up was some Piave cheese; a quick pre-lunch trip to Murray’s Cheese at Grand Central resolved this garnish dilemma. (We would have purchased the called for Parmigiano-Reggiano, but that cheese is pricey!) So we made the soup at home in 20 minutes, poured it into Tupperware and reheated it after our trip to Murray’s cheese. The final result? A tasty, calming soup that actually filled us up—though the ample amounts of Piave cheese definitely helped this soup’s satiety!

It took a great deal of willpower last night not to scarf down all of this Gorgonzola gnocchi. Thankfully, we preserved and had a few tasty bites left for lunch today. To save this pasta from nuked microwave monotony, we sprinkled some fresh grated Parmigiana for needed texture. We probably should have also added some healthy veggies—springtime scurvy isn’t something we should be aiming for!

Empanadas! Empanadas! Empanadas! We can’t stop saying empanadas, thinking about empanadas or eating empanadas. This insanity all started last week when we took a vegan empananda class (we aren’t vegan per se, but we will eat almost anything—including seitan!) from Terry Hope Romano, aka the Vegan Latina, at The Brooklyn Kitchen. This past weekend, we cooked up an empanada storm and ended up with tons of sweet (guava paste and machengo cheese) and savory (chicken, black beans and white rice) empanadas chilling in our fridge.

Come Monday, we threw them in our work’s toaster oven, poured some homemade green aji sauce on them and nuked some black bean and rice sides for a seriously tasty meal. Beware: this is serious hearty fare! Make sure you have a strong cup of coffee to snap you out of a food coma or we might loose you to the Land of Nod. In fact, we are still in our coma, so if you want the recipes for these tasty treats, send me a Tumblr message—we need a second cup of joe!

As a serious recipe addict, we have read through our share of cookbooks. But few are as cute and darling as Black and Blum’s “Lunchbox Revolution: Recipes for a Proper Lunch.” Designed by Gil Kahana and Michiko Nita, the book offers 15 recipes, a lunch box manifesto and ingredient illustrations that would make any graphic artist envious. Despite these details, each recipe is quick and simple to make—the “Bulger and Halloumi Salad” immediately caught our eye …and our tastebuds. Of course, we are probably going to pass on the “Ham Roll Bento”: we are still too traumatized by our Lunchable school days to eat cold ham any lunch time soon.