The Kitchen Mouse

Sometimes you want a bit of chocolate cake and don’t want to take the time or the calories to make a full 9″ double- or triple-layer cake. I tend to be very prone to having fits of chocolate cravings so the other evening, I decided I really needed a chocolate fix. Nor did I feel like waiting the three hours for a cake at 10pm at night. I didn’t even want to wait the 45 minutes it would take for me to whip up a batch of Double Chocolate Muffins.

As I’ve alluded here in the past, I’m not eager to bake a whole cake for one craving when I’m trying to reset my eating and lose some weight. I wind up eating at least half the thing over the following couple of days (wouldn’t want it to get stale!) and feeling guilty. I didn’t feel like having a generous helping of guilt along with my cake.

I remembered seeing someone on my RSS feeds link to this mug cake recipe. I’ve tried those mug cakes before and honestly, it didn’t really work out. (Don’t trust those 5-ingredient recipe thingies for mug cakes. They just don’t taste like cake.) This one, on the other hand, looked like it was right about what I had in mind.

Unfortunately, the original two-mug recipe isn’t the most “light” creation, clocking in around 500 calories in each mug once a bit of ice cream is added in, but it’s less than the average slice of cake and far less than the average half a cake. However, I found that the first time I made it, it was really too much at once for me, so I like to subdivide the recipe into four mugs, saving a couple for later. (I found this is easiest to do if you mix the batter up in a bowl and pour equal portions into each mug.) I also plan to rework it a little to see if I can reduce the calories.

It turned out really well. (You’re not surprised, I can tell. I don’t post recipes I don’t like as I would feel bad leading you down some rotten path and this blog is my personal cookbook.) It came out moist, not too dense thanks to the cake flour and baking powder, chocolate-y and just right with a bit of ice cream. It was definitely just right to satisfy my cravings for a while. Also, a tall glass of milk is really, really good with this, as is a bit of fresh strawberry sauce.

This recipe makes two big mugs’ worth or four normal mugs’ worth of chocolate cake, so you need to split the ingredients equally between the mugs. The hardest part is splitting the egg; here are a few methods for measuring besides pouring and hoping. Use your kitchen scale and weigh the beaten egg, then replace it with the mug on the scale and pour in half by weight. Or, mix all of the ingredients together in a bowl and then pour equal amounts into each mug. This is the method I find the easiest, even if it dirties up an extra bowl. Alternatively, you may find it easier to use a product such as Eggbeaters which allows for measuring out a portion of an egg.

It’s mid-March and though we’ve had pretty nice Spring weather lately, we still get the occasional storm that snows us under for a few days. This past weekend was one of those storms and we had about 8″ of snow in a day. Of course, we’d just put away the heavy leather jackets we wear in the winter, the snow shovel and salt! Isn’t that always the way?

Naturally, it was a night to have soup. We had acquired a bunch of green cabbage on sale at the local grocery but it needed to be used fairly quickly so it didn’t go bad. I wanted something easy to make, filling and satisfying, then remembered this recipe I’d found when researching a question for someone. It was perfect for a cold, snowy night.

My recipe below was adapted from one of the Ukrainian recipes on Wikibooks but honestly could be said to be from any of the countries in Eastern Europe. Cabbage soups are quite common there and I’ve had variations on this theme in both Poland and Latvia. Often, this soup incorporates sauerkraut, as fresh cabbage is obviously not available year-round.

One area where I deviated was in my use of spices. Traditionally, as with many dishes from Eastern Europe, dill is the spice of choice. However, for all that my husband is Latvian, he really does not like dill that much (I believe a few meals that were overwhelmed with dill rather put him off of this herb unless carefully used and balanced). I had come across a bunch of fresh thyme at a market last week and, unable to resist, snatched up a bunch and cackled wildly (ahem, perhaps not too loudly). Letting fresh thyme, particularly thyme that looked as if it had just been snipped from a local greenhouse, go to waste would be a cardinal sin. The fact that I love fresh thyme might also factor in!

I’ve found that I really love cabbage soups. The cabbage becomes so tender and tasty! If possible, use Spanish smoked paprika rather than regular. The smokiness really adds to the soup’s flavor.

Since I’ve been a day off all week, I decided to just keep it going. I’ll resume my normal posting schedule on Monday.

My husband and I eat a lot of green cabbage. It’s cheap, nutritious and very filling. It can be a challenge some days to make sure he’s full and doesn’t feel snacky after a meal. Cabbage helps ensure that he feels full and doesn’t overeat snacks. (It helps me too!)

Often, we do something simple like grated cabbage, carrot and roasted corn with a simple vinaigrette. Or possibly just cabbage and carrot. That can get old pretty quickly, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for interesting variations to incorporate into our menu.

In one of the issues of Cooking Light I received this year, they had an entire section devoted to cabbage salads, which seem to be referred to as ’slaw’. I guess I never quite made the leap from “cole slaw” to “slaw” as a reference to shredded cabbage salad.

In any case, we tried this one and were rather happy with it. It’s peanutty and spicy, crunchy and tasty. Adjust the chile paste to suit your taste – I preferred mine without quite as much spice as the original, so I started at 1/2 tsp.

“This is really good!” exclaimed my husband. It isn’t often that I seriously wow him with a new recipe. (He loves my cooking and he loves what we make together, but this became an instant favorite of his.)

This is a vegetarian dish to serve to omnivores who don’t know how good cooking vegetarian can be: it’s rich, intensely flavored and quite filling. The fact that it’s also incredibly cheap (once you invest in the spices, hopefully at a store that offers bulk spices which are much, much cheaper and fresher) and nutritious are added bonuses.

I would recommend that you serve this over a whole grain or rice: brown rice, steamed millet, quinoa, barley or couscous. Not only will you get even more nutritious yumminess out of it, but the fluffy texture of these sides really goes well with the dal.

Plus, honestly, this recipe does not look like much when it’s done. It’s a sauce, which is why my picture above shows it mixed into toasted garlic millet (which I will post about soon).

Don’t forget your veggies. Cooking Light recommended steamed broccoli. I recommend a cabbage-carrot-corn salad with a splash of a simple vinaigrette.

And finally? I seriously advise you to try this. It’s that good.

Last weekend was a busy project weekend for my husband and me. Grace, our most mischievous cat, had decided to play in our homebuilt lightbox. By play in, I mean she jumped inside, clawed two of the three tissue paper diffusers to shreds and jumped out through the third.

Granted, our old lightbox was basically a cardboard box with tissue paper sides. Not much and it was definitely cheap. We’d known for a while that we really should redo it; we’d both been getting frustrated with its limitations. We just didn’t have a reason to do it.

Thanks Grace. (You can see how innocent she is.)

While we were looking for a small dry erase board for me, my husband saw foamboard and had an idea for a lightbox. He designed it, modeled it and came up with the parts we’d need. The next day, we went to our local hardware store and picked up all of the parts we’d need.

It worked out fantastically well. I’ll post a tutorial on how to make it later this week, but it blows the doors off of our old cardboard box. I wanted to share two of our test shots with you, just for the hell of it, which is why today’s recipe is pretty basic.

Plus, after fighting with writing and rendering illustrations so we could explain it to others resulted in pushing dinner to just before bed, we needed to eat quickly. We still wanted to have a healthy dinner though. Enter the chef salad.

A chef’s salad, at least to me, is a jumble of a salad. I usually make it with whatever leftovers are hanging out in the fridge that need to be used up. (I also do this with fried rice.) I have my favorite salad toppings that I usually put on too. They’re a main course, so make sure you throw on plenty of veggies and enough protein to satisfy. The best thing is that these salads are terribly easy to throw together, only requiring some basic chopping of ingredients.