Stuffed Tomatoes…and Stuffed Bellies!

Marnina loves to prepare stuffed foods.  If you haven’t seen the pumpkin we stuffed, or read about the stuffed Zuccanoes, then hopefully you will now understand Marnina’s love for stuffing.  For Shabbat dinner last week, we made Moroccan hamburgers, and stuffed tomatoes seemed like a suitable side dish.  We even found a Moroccan-inspired recipe that uses couscous, a grain staple commonly found in Morocco, as the base of the stuffing.  And on the topic of Morocco, Marnina and I are thinking of traveling there during the summer (any Morocco travel-related suggestions??).  Wherever we go, we will definitely report back about the cuisines that we encounter.

Blintz Soufflé…and Added Fiber

On numerous occasions, Marnina has declared that soufflés are her favorite food.  Soufflés combine some of her favorite aspects of food: a savory dish that is soft, easy to digest, has cinnamon (one of her favorite spices!), and is just fun to eat because of its multi-layered nature. The ingredients are almost always on-hand (who doesn’t stock their freezer full of cheese blintzes?!?), and the aroma that wafts out of the kitchen during the baking process is heavenly.  The soufflé is like an omelet on puffed-up steroids (PUN INTENDED 🙂 ); it has an egg base, and while the base provides the flavor, the beaten eggs provide the ‘lift’ during the cooking process.

Curried Pesto Zucchini Linguine

In a previous salad post, Marnina lamented about how she had not eaten a real salad in many years.  For the most part, the only salads that she can eat must consist of cooked veggies and a bit of iceberg lettuce if she feels like her intestines are up to the task.  She gets overwhelmingly excited when she finds a salad recipe she can eat, which is exactly what happened when we found a pasta salad made of zucchini instead of real pasta.  Zucchini is one of Marnina’s safer veggies, especially because of its soft outer layer and its low-residue nature.   Marnina aims for an intake of less than 3 grams of fiber per food item, which is generally considered a low residue/low fiber diet.

Smokin’ Hot! A Must Read!

Living in an apartment slightly limits the cooking techniques available to us.  For obvious reasons we cannot grill or barbecue, unless we use those faux grilling machines (ie a George Foreman).  Thanks to modern technology, indoor smokers are available that do a remarkably good job of mimicking a real smoker.  A smoker is similar to a grill, but while grilling usually involves cooking the food over the heat and hot smoke of a fire of wood or charcoal, a smoker only uses heat from the burning of a plant material, such as wood.  Meats and fish are the most commonly smoked foods, though the smoker used for the purpose of this blogpost states that it can also smoke cheeses, vegetables, and other foods.