Tag Archives: Starving Artist

Hibiscus Nectarine Tea: A Trip to Hawai’i in a Glass

4 Aug

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When I was attending college in LA I became friend with few ladies from Hawai’i. We were equally distant from home, each of us taking a six-hour flight to get to Scripps. More than just the physical distance, we felt culturally far from our origins. They were used to the slower and friendlier island life, where drivers rolled down their windows and signaled the shaka sign while saying “aloha” and everyone let them through. I was quickly pegged as a New Yorker thanks to my mostly black wardrobe, sarcasm, and the way I quickly walked through crowds, ignoring strangers who tried to engage me. I knew a hand gesture as well, but it was a lot less friendly.

One of my dear Hawai’ian friends had the corniest sense of humor. As we’d walk around campus, she would point to one of the beautiful blooms, and ask me, “Do you know what this was called?” She amazed me with the way she always seemed to know the name of every tree and budding flower, and I was glad to pass the test. “A hibiscus,” I answered. She pointed to another bloom just a little lower on the tree. “What is this one called?” I paused, confused. Was I missing something? This was surely the same flower. “A low-biscus,” she laughed. I groaned.

Summer calls for tropical drinks, and what’s more tropical than hibiscus? I decided to make a hibiscus iced tea infused with fresh fruit.

Hibiscus Nectarine Tea

This is not the sweetest of teas, so you may want to add sugar or honey.
Or, turn it into a festive summer punch by adding a splash of gin!
Brewing your own tea is a great money saver for the starving artist.
It’s also more healthy because it allows you to control the sugars and preservatives. Hibiscus is a natural source of vitamin C. It’s also believed to lower blood pressure. It’s like a trip to Hawai’i in a glass!

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Grillin’ Like a Villain: Sriracha BBQed Cauliflower

16 Jun

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BBQs can be the pits when you’re a vegetarian. Everyone scarfs down hot dogs and hamburgers, while you’re left with an ear of corn on the cob which you can’t possibly eat in a civilized manner in public and a heap of potato salad that’s been dangerously sitting out in the sun for too many hours.

When my friends at Christ Resurrection Church invited me to a BBQ, I decided to step up my game. Inspired by the buffalo cauliflower recipes I’d seen on pinterest, I came up with my own finger-lickin’ recipe: Sriracha BBQed Cauliflower.

The result?

I literally overheard someone refer to my sriracha bbqed cauliflower as “insane.”

Yeahhhhhh, it had quite a kick to it thanks to the sriracha sauce.

If you’ve been living under a rock, here’s a mini lesson on what sriracha is: The legend is so mysterious that no one knows its exact origins, but the hot sauce takes its name from a city by the sea of eastern Thailand called Si Racha, where it is believed to have been concocted in the 1930s. A thick red paste, sriracha is made from chili peppers, garlic, distilled vinegar, as well as sugar and salt. Here in the states, it’s sometimes referred to as “cock sauce” because of the rooster on the bottle distributed by Huy Fong Foods.

My quick-and-easy recipe is essentially a whole lot of sriracha dumped all over a head of cauliflower:

  • wash the head of cauliflower
  • chop off the leaves and stem of the cauliflower
  • chop up the cauliflower into “florets,” those little tree-like nubs you often see on crudite platters
  • dump the cauliflower florets into a large bowl (if you don’t have a large bowl a large pot will also work)
  • next, chop up an entire onion and put the diced onion into the large bowl with the cauliflower
  • open a can of garbanzo beans/chickpeas, drain the water, put the garbanzo beans/chickpeas into the bowl with the cauliflower and onions
  • now comes the fun part: drench the contents of the bowl with sriracha and add soy sauce and garlic powder. I cook a bit like Jackson Pollock paints; I toss the ingredients together til I’m satisfied. I don’t have exact measurements for any of these, but you want the main ingredient to be the sriracha, and you want to make sure the food is evenly coated. It would’ve made sense to stir the sriracha, soy sauce, and garlic powder in a bowl ahead of time so they become a unified mixture, but I don’t have a dishwasher and didn’t want to wash another dish so I just made sure to mix and roll everything around real good in the bowl.
  • next, place a long sheet of tin foil horizontally over a plate or bowl (press it down to the bottom) and then a long sheet of tin foil vertically over the first piece of tin foil so it creates a cross shape (this is so that you have a tough and secure grill packet that you can move onto the bbq)
  • once the cauliflower, onions, and garbanzo beans/chickpeas are evenly coated, pour it onto the tinfoil and wrap it up. i let it marinade in the fridge overnight
  • when it comes time to bbq, put the entire tinfoil packet of food onto the grill. keeping an eye on it, let it grill to your desired level
  • you can serve it right out of the tinfoil packet!

The prep time for this under half an hour; the grilling is also under half an hour. The ingredients can all be eaten raw so don’t worry about having to cook it for any certain length of time.

This is a super budget-friendly BBQ recipe for starving artists. To get more bang for your buck, buy the garbanzo beans/chickpeas dried and soak them overnight instead of buying the canned version.

The Sriracha BBQed Cauliflower works as a main course or as a side. It goes great with black bean burgers.

Hashtag? #notyourgrannyspotluck

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Pinterest Fail Version of Loaded Cauliflower “Mash” Bake

26 May

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Pinterest fail? I spotted this Loaded Cauliflower “Mash” Bake on Pinterest, and it looked so yummy! It’s kind of a “skinny” version of loaded mashed potatoes. Not necessarily “great” for bikini season but better than potatoes would be! As a vegetarian, I had to swap out a few ingredients. Instead of bacon, I used some sort of green pepper type thing that my mind is currently blanking on the name of. It tasted okay but wasn’t quite as photogenic. Oh well, a starving artist has to eat!

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The Starving Artist Toasts Ernest Hemingway with a Daiquiri Recipe

22 Jul

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“I drink to make other people more interesting.”

~ Ernest Hemingway

 

Starving artists know that birthdays mean free drinks at the bar. Today we toast to Ernest Hemingway, who would’ve turned 115 years old yesterday.

Hemingway had a bit of a reputation as a drinker. “I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure,” he wrote to the Russian translator and critic Ivan Kashkin. He and James Joyce used to toss back drink after drink together, though in that same 1935 letter to Kashkin he said alcohol wasn’t beneficial to writing. He was always a drinker, but after getting injured in a plane crash he drank even more heavily.

More than a few articles have been written about Hemingway’s drinking:

  • 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Ernest Hemingway’s Drinking Habits (via Food Republic)
  • The Passionate Affair Between Alcohol and Ernest Hemingway: The Paris Years (via Modern Drunkard)
  • How to Drink, the Hemingway Way (via Salon)
  • Why Do Writers Drink? (via The Guardian)
  • Hemingway and Me, at the Bar (via The Washington Post)

Being an alcoholic is probably not the reputation anyone wants. No one wants to be dependent on alcohol. It can destroy your life and the lives around you. If you drink, drink responsibility. But there’s no shame in not drinking either!

Hemingway’s favorite drink was a martini, but he was also closely associated with mojitos and daiquiris. I thought a daiquiri would make a great summertime drink, so here’s the Starving Artist Hemingway Daiquiri recipe:

2 ounces white rum

¾ ounces lime juice

½ ounce grapefruit juice

¼ ounce maraschino liqueur

Blend these altogether with a cup of ice. Who has time and money for fancy garnishes like maraschino cherries and lime wedges? Drink this sucker from whatever glass you have clean as you sit on your stoop, defining your own generation.

 

You might also like these other posts from my blog:

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The Starving Artists Gulps Down Konditori’s Swedish Coffee

15 Jul

coffeeMy friends were visiting from DC recently and we popped into Konditori for a quick coffee break while we were in Williamsburg.

Now, if you’ve been following my blog for a while now you know that we Swedes love our coffee. You’d also know that coffee is strongly associated with the culture of the Beat Generation and that I’ve written about Jack Kerouac’s coffee habit. But that one of my all-time favorite quotes is a quote about coffee by Saul Bellow. Of course, Brooklyn is far from the only place with a rich coffee heritage. So, really, is it any surprise that Konditori was on my list of places to check out?

I got the Swedish roast. It cost $2. I had a little mishap and the creamer top fell straight into my cup, so the hipster kid at the counter nicely gave me a fresh cup. I was too scared after that to try to put milk or cream in so I drank it black, which I usually do at home or in the afternoon anyway. I’m oddly not one of those people who takes my coffee the same exact way every time. Strange, I know. Anyway, the coffee wasn’t full and robust, but it did have a lot of flavor to it. I think if I were to go back, I’d try their latte.

What’s your favorite Swedish brand of coffee?

 

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The Starving Artist Eats Watermelon Feta Salad

24 Jun

Yesterday I shared that summer was all about karpouzi at my house.

The other Sunday, after church, I had my friend Sandra over for brunch and wanted to make something special. I decided to try my hand at a watermelon-feta salad. This isn’t something I ever grew up eating, but when I attended the GABBY Awards a few years ago, one of the passed meze they served at Ellis Island before the ceremony was cubed watermelon with feta speared with a toothpick. Since then I’ve seen delicious recipes for it watermelon and feta salads. I decided to make my own version, topped with an exquisite dark chocolate vinaigrette my friend Rori gave me as a housewarming gift.

Lomogram_2014-06-08_04-34-41-PMHere’s my super-easy, super-quick recipe:

  • Cut watermelon into chunks
  • Cut Feta cheese into chunks
  • Mix the watermelon and feta in a bowl and top with pistachio meat (meaning pistachios out of their shell)
  • Drizzle dark chocolate vinegar over the salad
  • Serve!

See how easy that is?! You can prep ahead by cutting the watermelon and the feta into chunks the night before, but I recommend waiting until you’re about to serve guests to mix the ingredients together so that they retain their individual flavors and so the nuts don’t get soggy.

The ingredients are, admittedly, a bit on the pricier side, but when you make it yourself you save a lot of money. This is part of a new series I’m doing called “The Starving Artist.” I used to do posts called “Tasty Tuesday,” but I’m switching it up a little now to focus on budget-friendly recipes for writers. You might also like these feta-inspired appetizers:

I’m looking to get more fruit in my diet this summer. If you have any unique watermelon recipes, please share them in the comments below!

 

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The Starving Artist Eats Burgers on the BBQ

17 Jun

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Summertime was all about BBQing when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey. (So much so that it even found its way into my memoir!) We spent many humid nights outside under a canopy of green leaves and stars, swatting away mosquitoes, as we ate food from the BBQ. Most of the year, my family didn’t eat dinner altogether too often because my father worked long hours and got home late—and because he didn’t eat the same “American” foods that the rest of us ate. In the summer, when it was too hot to turn on the oven, he’d fire up the grill.

Now maybe it’s a regionalism, but I recently BBQed with someone not from the TriState area and discovered that “BBQ” to them meant something entirely different. BBQ to them is its own separate category of food. It’s a big deal. An art. What I call “BBQ,” they think is just basic “grilling.” To my ears, grilled anything sounds like something off a health-food menu. As in, you order grilled chicken when you’re on a diet, even though what you really want to eat is fried chicken.

But grilling doesn’t have to be equated with flavorless meat topped with zero-calorie iceberg lettuce. Nope, we made stuffed burgers. We stuffed it with Fontina cheese and mushrooms and onions and peppers and so much deliciousness. Or at least it looked delicious to me. As a vegetarian, I made due with veggie burgers luxuriously slathered in Stubbs BBQ sauce. My skinny little soy burgers weren’t nearly as exciting as the juicy stuffed burger. Sigh.

I just came across a recipe for a Feta-Stuffed BLT Burger, and my Greek American heart skipped a beat. I may not be able to eat it as a vegetarian, but for all you Greek cheese-loving carnivores out there I thought I’d pass it along: Feta-Stuffed BLT Burger recipe. And for those of us who abstain from meat, I’ll offer this alternative Greek vegetarian burger recipe:

  • BBQ your favorite veggie burger (I like Boca burgers) per the directions on the box
  • Grill some onions
  • Lightly grill a piece of pita bread
  • Once everything is grilled, place the veggie burger in the pocket of the pita
  • Stuff the pita with the BBQed onions
  • Also stuff the pita with a salad of feta, tomatoes, and cucumbers soaked in olive oil and oregano

Eat and enjoy!

This is part of a new series I’m doing called “The Starving Artist.” I used to do posts called “Tasty Tuesday,” but I’m switching it up a little now to focus on budget-friendly recipes for writers.

I’m always on the hunt for vegetarian-friendly Greek foods for the BBQ, so if you have any suggestions please post them in the comments section.

Also, did you know Greeks have a whole holiday devoted to BBQed meat?

If you’re not a meat-eater, you might also like this Greek vegetarian BBQ idea.

 

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