Remember my post about Tequila Lime Chicken Tacos? I made fluffy tortillas from scratch (and oooh, were they ever good!) based on a recipe from one of my favorite bloggers: Suzanne McMinn of Chickens in the Road. (She has a lot of really good recipes, including one for what she calls "Grandmother Bread" that's an easy bread recipe that is in my pile of recipes to make.)

Because I really enjoy her writing, her posts and her photos, I've been voting every day for her to win an extremely cushy blogging spot at SAM-E. I can't believe they're willing to pay out so much and from what she's said, it would be huge for her if she won the position. (She's a struggling single mom, but somehow manages to stay cheerful. I'm sure Clover helps!) She was top in the first round, but now the second, final round is underway and it's close. Really close. I think she could use some extra help and I hope you will vote for her too.

So, if you feel like helping, she could use your vote. Watch her video and vote for her, won't you? You can vote once per day until December 17th.

Thank you!

I like to clip the recipes out of the food magazines I subscribe to and put them into a neat, little pile. When it's time to come up with a RandomRecipe for the week's meal, I often pick through the pile looking for something that meets our needs for the week. (By this I mean it uses ingredients already in stock or on the list to buy and helps us meet the other menu requirements, like a soup or a beef recipe.)

One of the recipes I picked out a little while ago was for Chicken Souvlaki Skewers. It was really fast and easy, which made it an excellent candidate for having on one of my class-nights where I'd get home at some random time between 630p and 830p. (Planning meals around my tax class was interesting to say the least.) While I was at class, my husband decided to look for a Greek-style rice to accompany it, which he found in the The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook.

All I can say is, "Wow!" It was fantastic and oh-so-simple. This is definitely going into the repeat-meal category for when we need a quick and tasty meal.

I wish I'd taken a picture, but I was starving and it was good and well... it was gone. Maybe next time!

Notes:

1. The zucchini addition came from a recipe for souvlaki my husband looked up on MyRecipes.com. They'd alternated chicken with zucchini on the skewers after marinating both -- it sounded delicious but we didn't have any in the house.
2. You can use any kind of rice, but if it's brown, you'll need to use the second set of liquid measurements provided and allow more time for it to cook.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Independence Day celebrations in Latvia for the past two years. For my first, my husband's family had decided to take us all to Rīga for the parades. I saw the military parade and got to go to the Occupation Museum. It was also my first time puttering through Vecrīga (Old Rīga) which I absolutely adored.

My second time was more spontaneous in a way. My husband and I were in Rīga the day before (the 17th) on our last planned Rīga trip. We'd just gone to a restaurant (that took forever) and were walking back to our hotel** over one of the bridges when suddenly fireworks began going off on the other side! It was a dress rehearsal for the next day's celebrations and we were in the right place at the right time to see it. As others noticed, traffic simply stopped. A bus pulled over, passengers spilling out onto the sidewalk to see; a Mercedes simply stopped in the middle of a turn, the driver popping out to lean on his roof and watch. Pedestrians gathered and stared. It was a really great show. When it was over, everyone applauded and life resumed. But for a minute there, it was magical. The next day, we went to the concert and fireworks show next door to Kurzeme in Liepāja before visiting my brother-in-law's family.

This year is the first year I haven't been in Latvia during November and my husband's first as well. But, we won't be in school forever and soon we'll be starting our careers and saving money away for going back. Besides our desire to see family, I've made my husband promise me that we'll go back to see one of the Song Festivals that occur every four years and that we'll be there for the 100th anniversary of Latvia's independence. In return, he's declared that our next trip will be in spring or summer as I've only seen Latvia in the fall and winter.

I have to say, however, it's beautiful in the fall.

I thought about what I wanted to do for the holiday and eventually came up with this cake. In the South, red velvet cake is a tradition. I've never made it, much less had it, but I knew it'd give me the deep maroon of Latvia's flag. The white was a little trickier. Enter the fact that I decided to be fancy about it restricted me to a vintage copper-aluminum cake mold holding a whopping 4 cups and most cake recipes (especially Red Velvet recipes which are often three 9" layers) were simply too big.

I found a recipe for a Silver-White Cake in my Good Housekeeping cookbook. It used no egg yolks so that the cake would come out white as snow and after some fiddling, I had adjusted the recipe so I would get some white and some red velvet out of it. It came out beautifully, the colors perfect. I screwed up in my calculations, failing to take into account volume as well as area, so my proportions are off. (A Latvian flag's maroon stripes are exactly twice the width of its white stripe, and its length is exactly twice the width.)

Despite that, I think my little Latvian Independence Cake still came out well. My husband liked the flavor too -- tangy and not-too-sweet.

• I'd highly recommend the Occupation Museum to World War history buffs like myself, English audio narration is available but some knowledge of Latvian is helpful for reading signs. Other good museums I particularly enjoyed are the Museum of War (Latvijas kara muzejs) in the old "Powder Tower" in Vecrīga as well as the Open Air Ethnographic Museum (Brīvdabas muzejs) on the outskirts of Rīga. Both the Museum of War and the Occupation Museum are free to explore but renting narration in your language will run you a few lats.

** Hotel Enkurs (www.hotelenkurs.lv) -- This is where I stay in Rīga and I highly recommend for those on a budget and willing to take a bus or walk to Vecrīga and other sights. It's clean and safe, with comfortable rooms. The staff speaks reasonable English and breakfast is good enough to get you started for the day.

Akmens tilts (Stone Bridge) over the Daugava just before the fireworks began. Photo by Artis Rozentāls

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Independence Day celebrations in Latvia for the past two years. For my first, my husband's family had decided to take us all to Rīga for the parades. I saw the military parade and got to go to the Occupation Museum. It was also my first time puttering through Vecrīga (Old Rīga) which I absolutely adored.

My second time was more spontaneous in a way. My husband and I were in Rīga the day before (the 17th) on our last planned Rīga trip. We'd just gone to a restaurant (that took forever) and were walking back to our hotel** over one of the bridges when suddenly fireworks began going off on the other side! It was a dress rehearsal for the next day's celebrations and we were in the right place at the right time to see it. As others noticed, traffic simply stopped. A bus pulled over, passengers spilling out onto the sidewalk to see; a Mercedes simply stopped in the middle of a turn, the driver popping out to lean on his roof and watch. Pedestrians gathered and stared. It was a really great show. When it was over, everyone applauded and life resumed. But for a minute there, it was magical. The next day, we went to the concert and fireworks show next door to Kurzeme in Liepāja before visiting my brother-in-law's family.

This year is the first year I haven't been in Latvia during November and my husband's first as well. But, we won't be in school forever and soon we'll be starting our careers and saving money away for going back. Besides our desire to see family, I've made my husband promise me that we'll go back to see one of the Song Festivals that occur every four years and that we'll be there for the 100th anniversary of Latvia's independence. In return, he's declared that our next trip will be in spring or summer as I've only seen Latvia in the fall and winter.

I have to say, however, it's beautiful in the fall.

I thought about what I wanted to do for the holiday and eventually came up with this cake. In the South, red velvet cake is a tradition. I've never made it, much less had it, but I knew it'd give me the deep maroon of Latvia's flag. The white was a little trickier. Enter the fact that I decided to be fancy about it restricted me to a vintage copper-aluminum cake mold holding a whopping 4 cups and most cake recipes (especially Red Velvet recipes which are often three 9" layers) were simply too big.

I found a recipe for a Silver-White Cake in my Good Housekeeping cookbook. It used no egg yolks so that the cake would come out white as snow and after some fiddling, I had adjusted the recipe so I would get some white and some red velvet out of it. It came out beautifully, the colors perfect. I screwed up in my calculations, failing to take into account volume as well as area, so my proportions are off. (A Latvian flag's maroon stripes are exactly twice the width of its white stripe, and its length is exactly twice the width.)

Despite that, I think my little Latvian Independence Cake still came out well. My husband liked the flavor too -- tangy and not-too-sweet.

• I'd highly recommend the Occupation Museum to World War history buffs like myself, English audio narration is available but some knowledge of Latvian is helpful for reading signs. Other good museums I particularly enjoyed are the Museum of War (Latvijas kara muzejs) in the old "Powder Tower" in Vecrīga as well as the Open Air Ethnographic Museum (Brīvdabas muzejs) on the outskirts of Rīga. Both the Museum of War and the Occupation Museum are free to explore but renting narration in your language will run you a few lats.

** Hotel Enkurs (www.hotelenkurs.lv) -- This is where I stay in Rīga and I highly recommend for those on a budget and willing to take a bus or walk to Vecrīga and other sights. It's clean and safe, with comfortable rooms. The staff speaks reasonable English and breakfast is good enough to get you started for the day.

I admit, when my husband first explained this dish to me, I thought it sounded horrible. He laughed, assured me it was actually very good and promised (threatened?) to make it once I'd arrived in Liepāja. (This was before I went to Latvia for the first time.) I watched him crunching up noodles and putting together a bowl with curiosity. I couldn't imagine eating crunchy ramen -- though now I feel silly because you could use those La Choy rice/wheat noodles they sell to put on salads and get the same effect.

You see, there is a very popular salad called "cheese salad" that this mimics for far cheaper. (Personally, I prefer ramen salad to cheese salad, in large part due to the texture of the noodles.)

I tried a bite, not really expecting to like it, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was really good, in that broke-food kind of way. (Satisfying, cheap and extremely unpretentious, much like grabbing fries from McDonald's when you're having cravings.)

It may sound weird, but really, trust me. It's good. It's also an extremely cheap, filling side (or, in a pinch, a full meal) but not really low-cal. Quite frankly, it's "Bachelor Chow."

Some weeks, it's difficult to decide on a recipe from Latviešu ēdieni. Many of the recipes are very difficult to source affordable ingredients for where we live, primarily herring and other fish dishes. And considering how often herring is used in Latvian cooking, that's a lot of recipes. Luckily, there are a lot of veggie-heavy salads that we can make for a quick and easy side for our meals.

However, this salad very nearly didn't get made at all, because two of the ingredients required substitution. The first, rutks, is a white radish with a mild flavor. I've seen pictures of them, usually at bountiful and overflowing farmer's market stands in the more veggie-growing friendly states of California and Washington. Here in Utah, however, the markets have been closed for almost a month and even the common red radish wasn't easy to find even during the season.

There was, however, a fairly common white radish variety that I figured I could find at Sunflower, one of our favorite stores that regularly carries all sorts of delicious produce. Daikon. I'd had quite a bit of it thanks to my frequent trips to various sushi and teriyaki joints and knew it was quite mild. (I love Japanese cuisine, but there's a dearth of it here in Utah sadly.) After describing it to my husband, he agreed it should be a workable substitute.

This salad is creamy yet crisp and goes well with beef and pork. (We had it with Kotletes and Boiled and Fried Potatoes, albeit with fresh thyme instead of fresh rosemary. Yum.)

Every so often, our favorite local store carries plantains, the banana's larger, starchy cousin. My husband, who was in awe of the banana prices when he came over, looked at them and wondered how they were. When we went to the new Winco in Salt Lake, they had a pretty good price on them, so we picked up a couple to make a savory, non-potato-based mash.

Plantains are an interesting banana. Unlike regular bananas, plantains must be cooked before consuming and the blacker they are, the sweeter they taste. Black plantains are very ripe and very sweet, best for desserts. Yellow and green plantains are best suited to more savory dishes. They're starchy, often used like vegetables and a good replacement for potatoes.

There are several ways to cook them, including making smashed plantain chips using a double frying technique. (Alton Brown does this on his show about plantains.) The fastest and easiest is microwaving, which I used, but you can also roast them instead.

Though plantains are a relative of the banana, this mash is not sweet, so for this recipe, you want two green or greenish-yellow plantains. If you have picked out solid green plantains, that's fine too. Save the black ones or black spotted ones for dessert.

Last Friday, I posted about making Easy Salmon Cakes. I made two too many -- which isn't enough for another dinner, but just enough for a lunch.

Believe me, those salmon cakes on a thick slice of dark, black bread with a schmear of garlic sauce are divine. I'd rather have them this way, in an open-faced sandwich, than as a main with some other starch on the side.

We've been playing with our recipe for Garlic Sauce and have settled on a slightly modified version which we like better. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to encourage you to try making our new and improved garlic sauce.

The ratio of mayo to sour cream is entirely dependent on the whim of the cook. If you prefer the taste of mayo more than sour cream, reverse the amounts. Or use less of one and more of another. This is how we like it, but we adore sour cream.

The first time I bought a can of wild Alaskan pink salmon, I thought I was supposed to remove the bones and skin, just like a regular fillet of fish. It took me almost an hour to manage it and I was so frustrated by the end of it that after I made salmon cakes, I swore up and down that I would never buy canned salmon again.

Well, that didn't happen. But I'll tell you what did: I learned how to eat tinned fish in Latvia. I learned that the canning process involved in tinning fish at least partially, if not fully, cooks the fish, softening the bones so they may be easily and painlessly eaten. I also, and most importantly, learned that tinned fish is pretty damned good.

Latvia is famous for one of its biggest exports: sprats (šprotes). When I was in Liepāja, my husband showed me the wall of refrigerated tinned fishies, some packed in oil, some in tomato sauce, and so on. He picked out a couple of different brands that he enjoyed, one of which was Rīgas Zelts, still my favorite brand of šprotes. I picked out a loaf of bread and we took them back to our flat to enjoy before a movie.

Dubiously, I picked out a sprat and laid it gently on a hunk of bread, the oil drizzling itself over the bread's nooks and crannies. The fish was thankfully missing its head, though not its fins, scales or other unmentionable fishie parts. I watched my husband take a large bite, shearing through the body of the fish with ease. I looked back at the fish, which seemed to look back at me. Shrugging my shoulders and thinking of the food rule I live by ("try anything and everything twice"), I took my first bite.

I had feared it would be slimy, or worse. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. The fish was full of flavor, rich and meaty. The bones and skin were nearly unnoticeable, the fins a pleasant change of texture. I was hooked.

Within a few days, I'd badgered my patient, loving husband into buying me more tins, then began branching out into all the wonderful fishie snacks enjoyed by Latvians. Before I left Latvia in 2008, my mother-in-law made me one of her favorite fishie snacks: fried lamprey in aspic. That, however, is another story. (I'll say this: Don't be afraid of lampreys either. Really tasty critters but I can't bring myself to eat the head and all its horrible teeth.)

The moral of this story is: Don't be afraid of tinned fish. You don't have to de-bone, just dump it in a bowl and mash it up. Within seconds, it'll look just like tuna.

I feel sorry for the lonely rutabagas sitting on the shelf at my grocer. No one ever seems to buy them, as evidenced by the checkers' bewildered query, "turnip?" when I pick up a few for the week. They're surprisingly good, usually fairly cheap and a good replacement for potatoes. Plus, they contain less than half the calories of a similarly sized potato.

I've never been much of a fan of mashed potatoes. Often they're too pureed and textureless for my taste, and mashed potatoes with just potatoes need too much butter and salt to make them entertaining to eat. So, I started experimenting. First, I had some leftover baked potatoes, so I mashed those up roughly with a bunch of different foods: bacon, leftover chard, dill, leftover roasted garlic, leftover broccoli... See a pattern? It made a fantastic lunch and I started reconsidering my mash. I still prefer the texture of mashed pre-baked potatoes to boiled, particularly since many mashed potatoes are simply too "wet" for me.

I've already talked about Beet Green & Bacon Garlicky Mashed Potatoes, which turned me on to the wonders of beet greens. Still, did it all have to be potatoes?

The answer is: Not really. We tried out substituting cauliflower for half of the potatoes. Turns out, it provides good texture and flavor without detracting -- and reducing the calorie count considerably! It's also an excellent way, I believe, to sneak in an extra serving of veggies for that recalcitrant veggie-avoiding spouse or kid. The cauliflower is just about indistinguishable from potato.

Enamored with exchanging various starchy veggies for potatoes, my husband and I came up with a new plan, which would incidentally use up some leftovers in the fridge. (I love using up leftovers because I'm horrible about actually eating them as whatever they were. Usually my husband snacks on them if I don't find a way to reuse them in another meal.)

Enter the humble rutabaga. When cooked, its softly yellow flesh is reminiscent of good squash if it were crossed with a potato. We already knew we liked it from the last beef stew we made, so since we had two leftover, it seemed a perfect candidate.

Despite the long ingredient list, this recipe comes together very quickly once all the chopping and prepping is over. Many of the tasks can be done contemporaneously, such as chopping up pork while the peppers roast.

Now, I love acorn squash and saw an opportunity to toss in some prepped squash I had left over from the day before, but some leftover baked yam or sweet potato would do just as well here.