The day I filmed the Almost No-Knead Bread video, I got some extra cooking done.  It made sense to have just a little more home cooking before we head off to Kauai for my cousin’s wedding.  The meal: Indian spice rub pork chops with raita (a yogurt sauce with cukes and tomatos) and Indian spice roasted potatoes.  Dessert was Swedish brownies.  And while I was at it, I whipped up a batch of meusli.

While the recipe was originally for chicken, I used pork chops in this Indian spice rub and raita combination from Joanne Choi’s Week of Menus blog.  Being a mother with young children and still a foodie, she manages to balance creative, complex flavors with ease of preparation and wholesome ingredients.  The only change I would make to the recipe is to add a little bit of brown sugar and a bit of salt.  The rub could have used a touch of sweetness.

Tawn and I enjoy meusli for breakfast – although in truth I eat oatmeal most days – and I find it isn’t too difficult to roast a batch of meusli when I already have the oven heated for some other baking.  Each batch is just a little different.  Based on Alton Brown’s granola recipe from the Food Network, I cut back on the sugar and substitute a little orange juice instead.  I sometimes substitute different types of nuts or seeds (flax, pumpkin, or sunflower) for the cashews and almonds in his recipe.  And I add a bit of cinnamon or sometimes freshly-ground nutmeg while the meusli is still warm.  After it has cooled, I add dried fruits.  This one is a combination of cherries, dates, apricots, and raisins.  Tasty and pretty healthy, too.

Now, you see why I had to bake some healthy meusli: to offset the caloric karma that came from these wonderfully sticky and chewy brownies.  The recipe came my from friend Per’s mother.  Since he’s from Sweden, I think I’m going to call these my Swedish brownies.  Some brownies are too cake-like.  These have an almost mochi-like chewiness (causing me to wonder what would happen if I added just a bit of rice flour to the recipe). 

The big challenge was that the recipe was in metrics – and I don’t have any dry ingredient measuring cups marked in deciliters.  Thankfully, the internet helped provide conversions and then I made note of the weight of the ingredients so I can measure by weight in the future.

Okay, enough food porn for one entry!