Recipes for Busy, Lazy Girls: Radish Toast
This recipe is for the laziest of them all. This recipe comes from The Kitchn, one of my favorite sites to peruse for easy recipes. All you need is a baguette, a few pats of butter, a handful or two of sliced radishes, a few sprigs of parsley, and salt and pepper. Toast thin slices of your baguette, then butter them and top them with the radishes, parsley, salt and pepper. It’s seriously delicious and great as a meal or as a snack for guests.
Recipes for Busy, Lazy Girls: Smitten Kitchen’s Chopped Salad with Feta, Lime and Mint
It’s pretty clear from the last few (not to mention meager) posts on this blog that my photography has taken a backseat to everything else I’m doing (music, dissertation, new job, kind of in that order, too). Hence the grainy Instagram photos. I’m hoping to get back to it in August, when my schedule slows down and Love and Radiation takes a break from performing, like, every day.
The photo above is my version of Smitten Kitchen’s easy-to-make Chopped Salad. What I like about this and the recipe I posted earlier this month is that neither requires much heat for preparation. If you’re living in the heatwave-stricken continental United States right now, you will appreciate this as much as I do. I just can’t bear to stand over a hot stove for more than three minutes. As for the oven - forget about it!
Click here for the recipe.
Recipes for Busy, Lazy Girls: Red Quinoa with Black Bean Salad
As my friends know, I’ve never been a fan of cooking. I’ve spent most of the last decade in apartments with hopeless countertop situations in the kitchen. I’ve also always been inordinately busy. Small kitchens and a packed schedule are the perfect ingredients for pasta, the fastest but always healthiest dish when it comes to maintaining a good diet.
I realized recently, however, what the real problem was: I haven’t been exposing myself to the right recipes. What I need are recipes that don’t involve weird ingredient that require trips to specialty food stores or any kind of appliances that I can’t fit into my kitchen (see under “food processor” and “double-boiler”). They’ve also got to be easy to make and not be exacting when it comes to all the ingredients and their amounts.
And, it turns out that there are lots of great recipes that meet these requirements! I’m going to start posting my progress on here in the hopes that viewing said posts will give me the smug self-satisfaction I need to continue this effort. The title of this series? Food for Busy, Lazy Girls. If anyone has recipes to share, I’d love to hear them!
First up: Red Quinoa with Black Bean Salad. My mom sent this to me from the Boston Globe. I’m going to post the whole recipe here, since news sites don’t always seem to archive their articles. But be sure to click the link for more recipes like the one below.
Serves 6
A stand-alone salad for lunch or dinner on-the-go, this red quinoa with black beans can be wrapped individually in large flour tortillas or used as the base for baking fish. In either case, splash some hot sauce on the grains if the heat from the chili isn’t enough. Red quinoa is darker than more typical white quinoa; use either one in this dish.
1½ cups red quinoa
3 cups water
Salt and black pepper, to taste
¼ cup olive oil
½ red onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 small jalapeno or other chili pepper, seeded and finely chopped
½ teaspoon ground cumin
1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced
1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
1 can (15 ounces) black beans, drained
Grated rind and juice of 3 limes
½ bunch fresh cilantro, finely chopped
1 avocado, thinly sliced (for garnish)
1. In a dry skillet, toast the quinoa over medium heat, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes or until the grains are aromatic.
2. In heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine quinoa, water, and a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat to medium and simmer for 15 minutes. Transfer to a large bowl, and fluff with a fork. Leave to cool.
3. In the skillet over medium heat, heat the oil. Add the onion, garlic, and chili pepper. Cook, stirring often, for 3 minutes. Add the cumin, and cook 2 minutes more. Leave to cool.
4. Add onion mixture to the quinoa with the scallions, tomatoes, black beans, lime rind and juice, and cilantro. Toss gently. Taste for seasoning, and add more salt and black pepper, if you like. Garnish with avocado. Karoline Boehm Goodnick
“Yellow.”
I’m taking a break from my life for a week in my hometown in Massachusetts. Which means doing a little photography, albeit with my phone/Instagram.
All photographs are the property of Your Love Was Fierce unless otherwise stated.
As I mentioned earlier, Love and Radiation debuted its very first record here in Chicago at Transistor. Here is the live audio of our set!
Audio and image via Transistor.
“Yuba River”
Nevada City, CA
All photographs are the property of Your Love Was Fierce unless otherwise stated.
A labor of love: Love and Radiation’s official demo. Music by Love and Radiation; art by Mary E. Jones. Hear and download it for free here. I’m so, so proud of this.
When it comes to music, anyone who has known me for some time knows that my desire to create it is often at odds with my perfectionist attitude. I have a lot of hang-ups. I didn’t grow up listening to the same music a lot of my peers did: I learned Carnatic singing and my parents played Carnatic music at home. I think my voice is kind of weird. An indifferent, if long-term, student of the violin and flute as a child, I am still astonishingly uninformed about music theory. And I rarely find it easy to write music. It’s hard, it doesn’t just ‘come to me’ as some people airily claim.
When I embarked earlier this month on my project Heptameron – to write seven songs in seven days – I had five major goals in mind. First: I wanted to get over the obsession I have with recording until I have the perfect take. I hoped that time constraints would force me to accept ideas for what they were, to record them and to move on. Second: I wanted to spark some new ideas: my dissertation proposal had eaten up a lot of my creative energy in the winter and prevented me from writing new music. Third: I wanted to experiment with different genres of music and to use my midi keyboard more than I currently do in my songwriting. Fourth: to think hard about the vocal style that was appropriate for each new song. And fifth (and least straightforward): I wanted to build some confidence in myself.
The results showed, inevitably, that there is lots of room for improvement: in programming beats, in learning how bass lines function in music, in playing open chords on the guitar. Oh yes: and acquiring better hand-eye coordination to play my new glockenspiel. But overall, I’m proud of the outcome. None of these songs are appreciably worse than anything I have written in the past and on which I have spent more time. If anything, many of them are better. For the first time, I appreciated the persistence of certain lyrical themes in my music. The large is that of darkness, which has been for me a topic of enduring fascination both within and outside of Heptameron. Death is another, mainly because someone very close to me passed away in early in March. Overall, there was a good mix of genre, instrumentation and style. And, I think I did a good job with the vocals: my favorites ended up being the quiet, spooky-but-cheery Ice Party and the wacky Neon Demon, in which I sang in my rarely used head voice.
In fact, one of the most exciting outcomes of this project, aside from the fact that I actually wrote seven complete songs, is that I came away from it deciding that I actually like my voice. Yes. It is weird. But it is different and it doesn’t sound like anyone else’s. To sum up? I am really looking forward to Heptameron II.
“Waiting, Full of Light”: the seventh and final song of my Heptameron project. File this one under ‘crazy.’
Details on it here, and some reflections soon to come. For the moment: I can’t believe I did it.
programmed drums/midi keyboard/vox = me
