Easy soups for cold and flu season - part 2

To follow up on the previous post about easy soups that you can make even when you're sick, here are two more simple soup recipes that got me through my long flu battle. I found my diet lacking in fresh vegetables while I was sick, so I made a conscious effort to make sure these two soups had lots of veggies. I used vegetables that were easy to store (longer shelf life), wash, and only required coarse chopping. I also made large batches so that these could each last me multiple meals.

Easy soups for cold and flu season (Part 1 of 2)

It's been taking me a while between posts lately because I've managed to be sick for the better part of the last two months. Cold and flu season can be pretty rough on your diet for a number of reasons - you may become so congested that you can't smell and thus can't really taste, or your throat might become raw and then swallowing becomes a pain. Or worse, you may lose your appetite entirely (which is when a foodie knows whatever bug he/she got is pretty serious).

If you're really lucky, you've got someone awesome in your life who's able to take care of you and cook some of your favorite comfort foods. But more likely than not, there are days when you have to fend for yourself, and then obtaining good nutritious food can feel like a herculean task. The lowest effort foods, which are those you can order for delivery/take-out or heat up out of the box/can, are often loaded with sodium or fat. At first they taste great, but eventually they leave you craving a good home-cooked meal. Luckily there are some really easy and nourishing meals you can whip up even when you're sick (I managed to pull it off even while groggy from flu meds). With the help of some half-cooking principles, each of these dishes took around 20 min or less of active prep/cooking time and had minimal chopping.

Holiday thanks from Culinaut

Now that we've recovered from our Thanksgiving food comas and our stomachs have been appropriately stretched for winter, it means we're solidly into the holiday season, (especially with Hanukkah starting so early this year). Of course, this means even more good eating, and tasty gifts!

Homemade treats make for great holiday gifts, but if you're like me and have ever tried shipping baked goodies cross-country it can get a little stressful. You've got to make sure you pick something that won't go bad over the course of being delivered, will still taste fresh, and will stay intact after being jostled in the mail. This year, I think I've come up with a pretty good solution: granola.

6 Meals from one rotisserie chicken (or your leftover Thanksgiving turkey)

Time for another round of half-cooking. Today's star ingredient: the rotisserie chicken.

If you're like me, the smell of roasting chickens at your local grocery store or Costco does a pretty good job of awakening your inner carnivore. Add to that convenience and reasonable pricing, and it's hard to say no. But unless you're feeding a family of six, you'll find yourself with enough leftover meat to be eating rotisserie chicken for over a week. No worries though, with just a tiny bit of thinking outside the box you can have 6 different tasty and easy meals. Oh and an added bonus: these recipes work just as well with roasted turkey, so with Thanksgiving just around the corner, you'll know what to do with those turkey leftovers.

Salads: an undeserved bad rap

Salads tend to get less love than other meal courses. It's what people who are trying not to eat food usually end up eating. The typical restaurant salad is boring: a bunch of iceberg lettuce and you consider yourself lucky when there's a tomato or crouton tossed in. I mean, no wonder no one gets excited about eating that.

However, today, I'm going to plant myself firmly in the minority camp of salad lovers, and I'll show you why with a salad that my foodie friend (who usually treats salads with disdain) proclaimed to be the best salad he's ever had. How's that for setting high expectations?

More half-cooking: chili soy succotash with potstickers

Given the warm response to the last half-cooking post, I figure I have to follow with another. Today's chili soy succotash is a dish that I learned from my dad and it's so easy that it's my go-to dish whenever I'm most crunched for time but want to get in some veggies. It also pairs nicely with meaty quick-cooking items like potstickers.

The art of half-cooking

It's really fun and rewarding to cook fancy stuff, and I wish I could do it all the time. But the reality is that unless you're basking in free time, or work as a food pro, there are just not enough minutes in the day to make the majority of your meals exquisite. This is especially the case if you're like me, working in the tech-startup world where 15 hour days and 7 day work weeks are pretty commonplace (and as a result instant ramen and microwave dinners are pretty commonplace too). So what do you do when you want a yummy, healthy meal and don't want to go out to eat every day? Where do you turn when you're fed up with how the Lean Cuisine never looks or tastes as good out of the microwave as the box cover would lead you to believe?

The answer is what I call half-cooking: using pre-prepared and often pre-cooked ingredients to help speed up your cooking. If you're a hard-core cook, this may seem like cheating. But if you enjoy being efficient while eating well, then hopefully this is more akin to a creative challenge on a time budget. I half-cook almost every weeknight, and as a result I've come up with a bunch of short-cuts and efficient recipes that help me get through the week with a happy tummy. I'll be sharing these tips in this and upcoming posts.

Demystifying truffles

I can never pass up a good truffle - they're sophisticated, decadent, gourmet bite-sized celebrations of deliciousness. And because they're so good, during a recent trip, I happily walked into the store of an acclaimed trendy chocolatier, where each piece of chocolate was displayed like a jewel in a glass case, and paid $2 a piece for tiny truffles barely larger than a postage stamp. If they're handled with such care, if they have the word "artisanal", and if there are folks raving about them on the online foodie haunts, then they must be worth it, right? And sure, they were pretty good, but after I ate the truffles (which went by quickly cause I could only afford so many at $2 a piece), I couldn't help but feel that I had succumbed to the truffle mystique.

The truth is, truffles are super easy to make; they just take a little patience.

People in the U.S. are most familiar with Lindt's spherical truffles or other truffles that have been encased in a molded chocolate shell. We'll get to those later on. Today, we're going to discuss the more traditional French style of hand-made truffles which are created by rolling balls of ganache (a mixture of chocolate and cream) in cocoa powder. It's this type of truffle that resembles the super expensive and equally yummy fungus of the same name.