No longer updating, but hope you enjoy the recipes!
Unfortunately, I got too busy to go back to blogging, after I was forced to take a break from it in 2015 because of tendonitis.
But you can still follow my cooking, eating, and travels on instagram: (@spontaneoustomato)
Chicken in Vindaloo Yogurt Sauce
If you’re looking for a simple way to fancy-up your protein at dinner time, then look no further. I found this gem of a recipe on Ruth Reichl’s blog, and it’s officially a keeper.
The dish is remarkably easy to make, but incredibly tasty. (It’s hard to go wrong, really, with yogurt and cilantro.) The yogurt sauce makes the chicken so tender, it practically falls off the bone. The vindaloo spices add heat, and the cilantro and mint give it that extra kick of freshness. My mouth is watering all over again just writing about it…
Canning 101: Strawberry Jam
Ever cook something out of your comfort zone, then find out it wasn’t too tricky after all? I feel this way about canning now, after just one class where I was reassuringly taught that canning-for-beginners is simply a matter of knowing the basics & following the recipe. Not that following recipes is my strong suit…
Anyway, I recently signed up to take a “Canning 101” class at a restaurant called The Goodland Kitchen in Goleta, CA. I had never canned anything before, and had never made any kind of jam either (other than the stuff you swirl into the batter when you’re using America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for blueberry muffins). The class also covered pickling! This, I admit, was its main appeal for me. But more on that in another post… back to the jamming.*
Tapas party: Sangria and Papas Bravas
I turned 30 last month. No big deal. The full import of this only really hit me when I took a trip to Europe and realized I hadn’t been there in TEN YEARS. Not since I was just a young ‘un spending my junior year of college abroad in Spain. Ten years later, and I still haven’t made it back to visit my beloved Barcelona, but on this trip, I did at least eat tapas in the Netherlands… All that Dutch-style Spanish food and something about just wandering the streets of Europe made me miss sangria something awful, and inspired the menu for my 30th birthday party.
And what a menu it was… I suppose I was a little overly ambitious; I attempted a few too many dishes and ended up with a little too much food. But so what if we spent the next three days after the party feasting on tapas leftovers? I have no regrets.
Homemade Mayonnaise and Garlic Alioli
In preparation for my tapas-themed 30th birthday party (that post coming soon…), I decided to make the most essential tapas element of them all: alioli. A traditional sauce from southern France/northern Spain (I think the name is actually Catalán), Aioli/Alioli is a creamy garlic spread, made from olive oil and eggs, that can do anything that mayonnaise can do, but better. And– as it turns out– this is one sauce that will convince many a mayonnaise-hating garlic lover to make an exception.
Actually, even in its pre-garlic stage*, this homemade mayonnaise led one particular mayonnaise hater I know to make an exception… Somehow mayonnaise becomes less of a gloppy and sickening indulgence** and more of a miraculous and tasty successful chemistry experiment when you make it yourself at home.
Easy Homemade Tomato Sauce
I’ve written earlier about my laziness when it comes to making my own tomato sauce. (Which is a little ridiculous, given how much I love tomatoes.) It turns out that even an especially delicious tomato sauce like this one is easy to make and uses simple ingredients. The hardest part is caramelizing the onions, which took me a good 30 minutes of stirring them slowly over medium heat. Totally worth it.
After that you can basically just let the sauce simmer on its own for another 30 minutes (while you cook your pasta or get your pizza dough ready). Like I said, easy. And your kitchen will smell WONDERFUL.
Rainbow Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting
When my girlfriend told me that she wanted to make rainbow cupcakes for my birthday, for some reason I imagined a batch of twelve cupcakes with two of them dyed red, two orange, two yellow, two green, two blue, and two purple. Little did I know just how ambitious she was.
In the meantime, we made sure to find out my little sister’s beloved and time-tested cream cheese frosting recipe. (So that if, in some unfortunate oven-related incident, the color streaks of batter all swirled together to make ugly brown cupcakes, then at least they would still taste delicious!) Actually, I’m not the biggest cake fan; I appreciate cupcakes more than cake because of their higher frosting-to-cake ratio. That’s right: I like the frosting. Especially when cream cheese is involved.*
Continue Reading: “Rainbow Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting”…
spontaneous tomato 
