Adventures with Bulgur

I don't really blog much about, well, anything, but I am trying to get into the habit.  '

First, I should confess.  I am a foodie.  I didn't admit this, even to myself, until my very good friend Jec self-identified as such and made me come to terms with it.  Since then I have embraced it!  It's like I finally found a name (other than fat kid, which if I remember correctly, is what Jec and I called ourselves in college) for my addiction/obsession/struggle with food.

But back to blogging.  Point is, I love to cook and I love to learn about healthy, nutrient dense foods and find ways to incorporate them into my Italian-American, cheese loving, decadent foodie lifestyle.  But most of the time, I am only cooking for myself and my man, and his reactions to my superfood meals range from eating-it-but-picking-around-the-vegetables-and-totally-ignoring-the-grain to taking-one-bite-and-having-a-bowl-of-cookie-crisp-for-dinner.  (I give him points for tasting everything).  So other than texting pics of my creations to my BFFs and sharing recipes with them, I have no outlet for my kitchen creativity beyond my own taste buds.  So here I am!  Determined to share my nutrient dense and still delicious (imho) recipes with the world!

A few disclaimers (since, after all, I am a "chef" second and a lawyer first):

• I am NOT a vegetarian or a vegan.  I love meat.  I love steak, bacon, even veal, and I could not imagine a life without cheese.

• That being said, I recognize that (for better or worse) animal products should not and cannot be the pillars of a healthy and disease-proof diet.  And since I pretty much love ALL food (I just tried to think of one I did not like to put in this parenthetical, and I was dumbfounded), I am enamored with many foods that traditionally are "substitutes" for animal products.  If I use them, it's because I like them/want to be healthy, and not because I in any way shun animal products as part of my diet.  

• If you are an ethical type vegetarian/vegan, as we say where I'm from, getthefuggouttahere.  No, really.  Read someone else's blog.  I believe in the food chain and you will never convince me otherwise.  I have visited enough blogs in my quest for healthier living/cooking to know that there are plenty of carnivore haters out there, and I am not interested in your soap box.  I have plenty of my own, but meat isn't one of them.

• More than half of what I make starts off with a recipe, usually from the internet.  I am constantly browsing Eating Well and Real Simple, and I love Rachael Ray (if she would just lay off the butter) but I also love the random blogs I find and sometimes even remember to save the website and return to it.  I will always credit my source unless in a rare case I have been making something too long to remember where I got it, and I will try to tell you my own additions/subtractions/changes/mistakes and take you through the process of me making their recipe.  So this is not, for the most part, a blog about my original ideas.  I am still at a point in my cooking where I often question what will go together so I google the ingredients I have on hand to make sure I am not crazy, and go from there.

But anyway... let's talk about bulgur!  Bulgur, in my opinion, is less glamorous than the other grains.  It doesn't sound as exotic or sexy as farro or quinoa, but its actually rather delicious.  It reminds me of quinoa in that it has that pop when you bite into it, and reminds me of farro because it has the same nuttiness.  I am not going to pretend I know exactly what it is, but I am pretty sure it comes from wheat.    Let me find a more precise definition -- hold on.

Ok, according to Susan Westmoreland in Good Housekeeping, 

"This nutritious staple of the Middle East is pulverized from whole-wheat kernels that have been boiled, drained, dried, cracked, and sifted. Bulgur differs from cracked wheat in that it is precooked."

Great, so now we have a definition, and we can talk about the bulgur I actually cooked!  Almost.  This dinner started with a chicken recipe, so let's talk about that first:

Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Pimiento Cheese! (c) Eating Well

I followed this recipe almost exactly.  I did not find any pimientos at the mediocre supermarket by my office, so I got some Italian red cherry peppers marinated in oil from the supermarket olive bar and they worked just fine! (Any suggestions on what to do with the leftovers?  I am thinking of stuffing some cheese in them, but I'd like something creative...)  Otherwise I did exactly what the recipe told me to do (right down to the internal temperature of the chicken... very important for safety reasons!)  I'm only going to post the photo of my version, but you can compare for yourself with the Eating Well recipe, and I think you will agree that I nailed it!! 

The recipe suggested barley and zucchini, but (1) I did not have any barley, and I had too many grains at home to buy a new one, and (2) the BF is not really a squash fan.  So I decided, steamed green beans, and then wondered what would be a good carb to balance the meal, when I remembered I had gotten a great price on a package of bulgur and forgotten to cook it. 

Soo I started to think.  I wanted something simple since there was a lot going on with that chicken.  Pilaf came to mind, but all I know about pilaf is that (at least for rice) you use broth instead of water.  So I called for reinforcement!  A friend gave me her family's top secret recipe (again, for rice pilaf, not bulgur), and I adapted it, enough so that she gave me permission to tell you here what I did:

1c bulgur
2 tbsp salted butter
2c reduced sodium chicken stock
salt and pepper

First, I melted the butter in the pot.  Then I added the bulgur and stirred it, just for 30-60 seconds maybe, until it was coated.  I added salt and pepper.  Then I added the stock and let it boil.  When it was boiling, I lowered the heat way down, put a lid on it (after cursing my kitchen out because it took me about 2 minutes to find the lid, in case anyone was interested) and let it sit until everything else was ready.  I turned the heat completely off after about 15 minutes (the recommended time for the bulgur on the package) and let it sit, covered, for as long as it took the damned chicken to reach 165 degrees in the over (in other words, forever).  

This isn't even the fun part!  Dinner was delicious if I do say so myself (the BF even liked the chicken, not so much the pilaf but he doesn't "taste with an open mind"-- trust me, it was awesome).  Afterwards I found myself with a lot of bulgur and I did not want to see it go to waste!  So I did a little fridge-digging, and came up with the following (note: all measurements are estimates cause I made this one up):

1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1 1/2 tsp minced garlic
1/3 cup chopped red onion
1/2 cup black beans
1 cup Kale (a handful), finely chopped
Salt and pepper
2 cups cooked bulgur pilaf
Olive-oil flavored nonstick cooking spray

Spray pan with nonstick spray.  Add garlic and onion and brown for 2-3 minutes, until onions get lighter in color and garlic gets darker.  Add red pepper, cook one or two minutes more.  Add salt and pepper.  Add kale and stir until it wilts - only a minute or two since its chopped so small.  Add the beans and stir just to heat them, maybe another minute, if that.  Finally, add in the cooked bulgur and stir to combine.

I had this for lunch today, and I have another serving left for tomorrow.  It was so good that I didn't want it to be over when I ate it this afternoon.  And it's gorgeous, check it out!