Allrecipes shout out!

I love, love, love allrecipes.com. Like other sites, it is searchable in a variety of different ways and has a virtual recipe box that allows you to save things that look interesting, and it lets you leave reviews on particular recipes. But I think it's great because it has a couple of features some other sites don't.  Namely, it allows your average users to post recipes and to tweak existing recipes and save those tweaks as custom versions (although I should say this is available to members at the supporting level). I find this enormously helpful for those times when I want a new recipe, but I want something another average person made in their kitchen with regular equipment and ingredients, not something out of Bon Appetit magazine that requires ingredients out of my budget and ok, fine, I'll say it, knowledge beyond my current culinary skill level. I also like that there are a number of affiliated food blogs with interesting and handy dandy information, as well as online groups that have sprung up within the allrecipes framework, such as one that specifically looks for recipes that do not have a photo posted, vote on one they all want to make, and then users all add their photos and reviews to help round out the site (and have some fun, too!).

I'm nursing a repetitive stress injury (from too much typing! blah!), and it has seriously curbed my kitchen experimentation over the last week or so...so what better time to cop out a little and just point you towards awesome things other people are doing online?

Here are a couple of great dishes from allrecipes.com that I've made recently, and that I would highly recommend. Happy browsing, happy cooking, and best of all, happy eating!

Turkey and Yam Tacos

These are fooddude's Turkey and Yam Spicy Tacos, which I've made twice so far and which are definitely going into the normal dinner rotation. It takes a little while to do the chopping, but otherwise is a fairly easy, healthy recipe with absolutely delicious results. You can tweak it, too, adding elements like beans or rice, changing the heat level, and choosing different salsas for a different flavor. I've actually only made it with store-bought tomato salsa, but will try it with a homemade tomatillo salsa as soon as I can get some decent tomatillos at the store. You can find the recipe here.

Slow Cooker Latin Chicken

I'm a sucker for a good slow cooker recipe. The best ones, in my opinion, make healthy meals that have a great fragrance to make your house smell lovely all day long. Crock pots are like magic--even though you might put a lot of prep into dinner earlier in the day, when it comes time to eat I always have that great feeling like dinner made itself. This is a great dish that combines the flavors and textures of beans, dark meat chicken, and sweet potatoes. It's a total winner, and it's even good reheated ( I stuck some peanuts on top of the leftovers for some additional texture--yum). I always make it with kidney beans and have served it on both rice and couscous. You can find the recipe here.

Challah

Lastly, I found a fabulous and very easy recipe for challah on allrecipes.com. There is a version in Claudia Roden's award-winning volume The Book of Jewish Food, but it makes four loaves and while I have mad bread-baking skills, I do not possess mad math skills. I just didn't think I could scale it since I only wanted to make one loaf. I still had to cut the recipe I used in half, but that was much easier for me. This is actually the first loaf of bread I've ever made using a recipe I found online (all the others have come from physical cookbooks), but I found it very clear and was surprised that making challah is really no trouble at all--as long as you're going to be home long enough to let it rise three times. I made the sweet version by adding extra sugar, since that's the kind that I came to love as a child. The bread is tender, has just the right density, is slightly sweet (but still not really a dessert bread), and thanks to the egg wash, has a perfect crust. You can find the recipe here. Oh, and please don't judge my bread-braiding skills. It looked better before I baked it, but presentation isn't everything.

Thanks to all the great allrecipes cooks who have inspired me and who have, more than once, saved me from dinnertime doldrums.

Bread Baking for Stress Relief

There are people who think that making something delicious in the kitchen sounds like a great way to unwind after a stressful day, and then there are those who think of stirring and preheating and measuring and decide that a delivery pizza sounds like a much better idea. Me? I'm a little bit of both. I don't always have a bad day and think, "I can't wait to get home and make something," especially when I set foot in my place and get a good, long look at my couch...which I could sit on oh-so-easily rather than trying to put together an evening meal.

That said, I have, over the course of the past year, discovered the fabulous art of bread baking, and for me, it is a total de-stresser. There's something fabulous about the feel of the dough, silky and pliable under my hands, and something really pleasing about the rhythm of kneading. I even love the smell of flour, which to me always seems to signal something wholesome and delicious.

Photo: Matthew Bendert

I've learned that the true art of baking bread is that the more you do it, the more intuitively you begin to work. There's a "zone," if you will, and you start to recognize what the bread needs at what stages. Recipes become less relevant, and you become, like bread dough, infinitely malleable. For someone like me who gets totally stressed out (even over little things), there's something freeing about working with my hands, from my intuition, and having something incredible to show for it. The smell of the bread baking in the oven makes me feel like I've done something extraordinary for myself--like I've done something to comfort and take care of myself, and that's before the first morsel has even passed my lips. It's aromatherapy, without those cloying florals and things that will make you sneeze.

I could go on and on about the joys of eating the bread, but I think I'll hold myself to just saying this: when I started baking bread at home, it was the first time I ever looked forward to eating a crust. The heel, which is mostly crust, now becomes a delicacy--a lovely, crunchy piece to savor rather than the bit that ends up in the garbage can once the rest of the loaf is gone.

Bread recipes abound, but I'm indebted to Beatrice Ojakangas, whose fabulous book of bread recipes has kept me busy for about 8 months as I try to work my way through all of them. I've kind of stalled with Oatmeal Sourdough. It is perfection, and I just keep making it again and again.

Never made bread before? Start now! It's not that hard! Go forth, make bread, and feel better.

Photo: Shannon Lieberman