Black beans, spicy Cuban rice & beans, and goat stew from Sophie’s. Nice follow-up to a morning in the cold moving furniture and boxes of cookbooks from the old office to the new one.

I wasn’t planning for this to be the recipe that broke the blogging dry spell, but after tasting the bite of the leftovers this morning I found I’d stumbled upon something. I’ve actually been cooking quite a bit lately, out of necessity and economy, fashioning meals that could’ve come straight out of the Trader Joe’s cookbook and might have been hard to defend in recipe form, like fish-stick tacos with homemade salsa, or turkey burgers with a secret ingredient (crushed pistachios) and pesto tortellini. Last night, after dropping over a grand on new apartment furniture (everything in our apartment except the bed is sourced from either Craigslist or the street, including a barely-used Ikea kitchen block, a cheerfully painted blue bookshelf that a nearby elementary school threw out, and two bar schools discarded by the Shake Shack downstairs), we had a cheap date that mostly consisted of spending five hours in the Museum of Natural History across the street and watching a terrible Robin Williams movie on Netflix Instant. In between, I made some nachos for dinner, bound by the constraints of the ingredients already in the fridge: a bag of frozen chopped spinach, a can of refried beans, an onion, a tomato, tortilla chips and good olive oil. 

The vegetable mixture that came out of this under-$5 experiment is good enough to serve for entertaining, the beans giving it a creaminess reminiscent of those vaguely-disgusting vaguely-delicious dairy-based dips that tempt and horrify me. 

Vegan spinach dip:

• 1 cup frozen chopped spinach
• 2 tbsp good extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 can refried beans
• 3/4 cup diced yellow onion
• Salt and pepper to taste

1. Saute the onion in a pan with a tablespoon of olive oil, stirring frequently.
2. Meanwhile, defrost the spinach with the remaining tablespoon of olive oil in a small covered saucepan. Once cooked through, add refried beans and stir until mixed well.
3. When onions are golden and translucent, add to bean mixture and stir well. If you like, melt a little cheddar on top. Serve with tortilla chips. 

Finally found a place in Hoboken that reminds me of Philadelphia. Pretzel bread, BBQ ranch salad with fried chicken, and creme brulee french toast with bacon. The caramelization on the surface of the toast perfectly mimicked the hard caramel on the surface of actual creme brulee, and the inside was just as creamy and custardy. Kinda a miracle of physics. Molecular gastronomy ain’t got nothing on this french toast.

I could eat Americanized Mexican food for most meals without ever tiring of it. It has so many things that I love: gooey, salty melted cheese, creamy beans & spanish rice, generous amounts of onions, avocado, and carbs in both chewy & crunchy forms. Sure, the often greasy and rich Mexican-inspired cuisine in the U.S., like Chinese, is far removed from its original form (chimichangas, for example, are a purely American dish), and yes, there’s the curious fact that most anything you order in many Mexican restaurants appears to be the exact same combination of ingredients. It doesn’t matter. I adore it, and therefore spent two meals over the past three days happily noshing on chips and salsa.

At Centrico: chips with mole, tomatillo and jalapeno sauces; pineapple salsa, spicy guacamole and red onion & mango salsa.

At Mary Ann’s: the Santa Fe burrito with grilled sirloin, pinto beans, lettuce, salsa , guacamole and melted Jack cheese.

After a few days without doing any cooking, I was feeling a little twitchy and my wrists were on the verge of involuntary chopping motions, so I made time tonight to put together dinner. At Whole Foods yesterday I’d purchased a two-pound chuck roast out of habit, not quite realizing that I wouldn’t be home for four hours to cook it. An overnight marinade helped to soften the meat, which was tenderized further by a pan sear followed by an hour and a half of oven braising. Served over some sauteed dinosaur kale, cannellini beans, onions and garlic, the roast made an impressive meal that almost fooled me into thinking it’d taken all afternoon.

I marinated the meat overnight (and most of today) in a mixture of ketchup, stoneground mustard, lime juice, olive oil, garlic, and herbs, then pan-seared it to form a crust on each side. I popped open a PBR that I’d found in the fridge (from St. Patty’s, I’m assuming) to braise the beef in, along with some more garlic and a healthy sprinkling of salt and black pepper. A chopped onion and five minced cloves of garlic went into the searing pan, followed by a drained, rinsed can of cannellini beans and two large bunches of kale that I pre-steamed with salt until it was beginning to wilt. 

I left the roast in the oven at 350 degrees for a little over an hour, but it might have been even better at just forty-five minutes, when the inside still showed more pink. Nevertheless, for my first effort in a while at cooking on a work night, this was a heartening experience.