Archive for the ‘Cooking’ Category
May 2, 2010
Okay, so it’s not a pot roast or roast chicken. But it is delicious. We’ve been making an effort to eat more vegetarian meals during the week. I shoot for having vegetarian 4 times per week. Some weeks it doesn’t happen, some weeks it does. It conveniently allows us to feel less guilty about the big juicy hamburger we seem to enjoy on the grill this time of year.
The jumping off point for this recipe was on the back of the red quinoa box from Trader Joe’s. I used it for the inspiration, but made my own dressing & added a few other veggies to the mix, including the fresh spinach.
First up, the red quinoa. Power house of the whole grain family.
Trader Joe’s has some delicious frozen roasted corn. I added 2 cups of that to the quinoa to conveniently cook both at the same time. Don’t judge this final dish by the picture below. The cooked quinoa serves as a bed under the dressed salad/veggies that we’ll add to the top.
Have you checked out the hispanic food section at your local Wal-Mart? I was shocked to see the variety of items there. Items that would cost twice as much at some of the markets we usually frequent. Case in point - - last summer we had a Mexican themed fiesta for the hubby’s 40th. I made a Rick Bayless recipe for dessert which called for goat’s milk caramel as the flan’s topping. Needless to say, I was sweating where I would get an ingredient like that. Voila! In the hispanic food section of Wal-Mart. I kid you not. And it was delicious.
This is also in that section of the store, and so good to have on hand. It’s a bullion of cilantro flavor. Perfect for this dish in addition to the fresh cilantro.
To take the bite and sting out of fresh garlic and onion, I roasted them first. The garlic got added to the dressing, and the onion was chopped into the veggies.
The cast of characters in the dressing. No firm measurements here.
The dressing (with fresh cilantro) gets whizzed up to a sort of loose cilantro pesto.
Dress your veggies in the delicious dressing and pour on top of your quinoa/corn mixture. The veggies included: a can of drained black beans, 1 pint cherry tomatoes, handful fresh spinach, 1 diced avocado.
I added a little crunch with some pumpkin seeds on top. This was a healthy, satisfying, main entree salad. We’ll do this one again for sure.
October 25, 2009
My idea of the perfect Sunday afternoon is to slave away in the kitchen. No joke. I really do. I love this time of year with the windows open, cooking shows on the television, and a big cooking project in the works. One of those projects is pasta making. Yes, there are some shortcuts you can take, like making the dough entirely in a food processor, and using a pasta machine, but it’s still a labor intensive process.
This time I made two types of pasta. One for the less adventurous eaters in our house: a simple cheese ravioli in red sauce. The other my personal favorite: butternut squash with brown butter sage.
Both pastas used the same pasta dough. Simply add 4 eggs, 3 1/2 c. all purpose flour and salt to the food processor with the dough blade in place. Run it until the dough balls up and runs around the outside of the bowl. Then turn it out onto a floured surface and knead a few times.
Once the dough is needed a few times, wrap it in plastic and set it aside on your work surface to rest about 10-20 minutes.
While your pasta rests, mix up your cheese filling. Ricotta, egg, salt, finely chopped parsley & basil and loads of fresh parmesan. Can’t go wrong!
Back to the pasta–run it through your pasta machine starting with the widest setting first, gradually moving down until you reach the second thinnest setting. Did I mention that little hands love to help with this??
Lay out your bottom piece, and space a heaping tablespoon of cheese filling along the length of the dough.
Put your top layer on, press out the air and cut with the fancy schmancy cutters you only use twice a year. Or an appropriately sized glass turned upside down works too.
Gently boil these babies, or freeze them in a flat layer. Once frozen, you can gather them up into a larger bag stacked on each other. Freezing them flat first keeps them from sticking together. When I learned this trick for berries and cookie dough, it was a happy happy day for me.
Saute some olive oil, garlic and onion til soft, and add a can of really good crushed tomatoes. Let that simmer with a few sprigs of fresh basil for about half hour and season with salt/pepper and a dash of sugar as needed. It’s a simple and delicious red sauce that is a go-to quick dinner around here. Top with freshly grated Parmesan. There’s never enough Parmesan for the kiddies here.
BROWNED BUTTER SAGE & BUTTERNUT SQUASH PASTA
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The butternut squash & sage pasta starts out with cubed butternut squash spread out and ready to roast…about 1″ cubes.
The cast of herbs and spices that make this squash sing. The result is a sweet & savory squash. They are: fresh nutmeg, cinnamon, sage & fennel seed.
Finely chop the fresh sage, add to a small bowl with some ground cinnamon, nutmeg, fennel seed, salt and pepper. Mix them together and toss onto the butternut squash along with a drizzle of olive oil. Roast in oven at 375 til the squash is nice and tender, slight carmelized.
Meanwhile, melt some butter in a pan and let it simmer away as the milk solids evaporate. Add some fresh sage leaves and keep an eye on things as the butter slowly begans to brown. It’s magic in a pan as the butter takes on a nutty goodness and the sage leaves crisp as they fry.
I had every intention pureeing the squash, adding cheese and making these into ravioli. After working away on the cheese ravioli, I decided to take the easy way out. Instead of re-rolling the pasta scraps from the cheese ravioli, I cut them into ‘rags’ instead. These were not fancy, by any means, but it gave a nice rustic feel to the finished dish.
Fresh pasta rags on bottom, roasted butternut squash on top, and finished with the brown butter sauce and freshly grated Parmesan. This dish is a perfect combination of sweet and savory. Love it! One of my favorite flavor combinations for fall.
August 25, 2009
The first time I had this salad was 10+ years ago. There was a great store called Sutton Place Gourmet across the street from the office I worked at in Virginia. They had a salad bar stocked with some great healthy choices, including this salad. When we moved from the area, I bought their Hay Day Country Market cookbook. It has *fabulous* recipes, and most of the pages in my book are well loved and stained from use.
I couldn’t find dry wheatberries anywhere here around Charlotte, NC. My SIL very nicely went and purchased some at Whole Foods last week and sent it down with my inlaws when they visited this past weekend. I couldn’t wait to make this recipe again!
Of course, I didn’t have all the ingredients on hand, but this recipe is so great for subsitutes.
The wheatberries will keep for a long time in a sealed jar.
Here’s a detail of the grain. It’s super healthy for you, and has a great chewy texture when cooked.
Here are the dressing ingredients: olive oil, walnut oil (the secret ingredient) and red wine vinegar.
While the wheatberries simmer, you can mix up the vinaigrette and chop the items that will be mixed in: parsley, chopped walnuts, chopped dried cranberries (in place of currents I didn’t have), chopped green onion. I also added a squeeze of lime into the dressing.
Since I had half a hothouse cucumber on hand, I diced that up too for nice crunch.
And I threw some fresh farmer’s market peas in with the wheatberries. I told you this was a very forgiving, flexible recipe.
While the wheatberries are still warm, toss with mixins and dressing. Yum! This is delicious over salad greens, or along side grilled chicken.
Wheatberry Waldorf Salad
Courtesy Hay Day Country Market Cookbook
Serves 6 to 8
1 cup wheat berries or kamut rinsed well
1 1/4 cups water
1/3 cup olive oil
1/4 cup walnut oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
Juice of 1 lemon
Kosher salt & pepper
3 large scallions finely chopped
1/4 cup parsley chopped
2 crisp red-skin apples cut into small dice
2/3 cup fennel
1/2 cup dried currants
1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts, toasted
Place the wheat berries in a medium saucepan add water, and bring to boil over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer until most of the water has been absorbed and the kernels are tender and pleasantly chewy, 30 to 35 minutes. Drain any excess water and transfer wheat berries to a large bowl.
Meanwhile, whisk the oils, vinegar and lemon juice together in a small bowl. Season to taste with the salt and pepper. Add the dressing to the bowl of warm wheat berries.
Add all the remining ingredients to the bowl, toss and refrigerate, covered until ready to serve. Well wrapped, this salad will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 days.
May 21, 2009
A new Mexican restaurant recently opened up near our place. The best part is that it’s the real deal. I’m embarrassed to admit how often I’d go there if I could. It’s that good.
After ordering (and loving) their chopped steak taco many times, I decided to go with something new. I settled on the carnitas tacos. I’d heard the term carnitas from various cooking shows…and my foggy sixth through twelfth grade Spanish education reminded me that carne = meat, and the suffix -ita means small.
The waitress asked if I’d like them ‘authentic’ style. Turns out, authentic style means the taco is served simply: meat in 2 layers of fresh corn tortilla, chopped cilantro, chopped onion. Before you think that couldn’t possibly be enough flavor, you need to try this. Forget about the loads of cheese, rice, beans and sour cream we’ve somehow come to expect in our in-authentic tacos.
I knew I had to find a recipe so that we could prepare this at any time at home. It’s not something you whip out at five o’clock to get on the table at six. In fact, it braises in the oven for three hours and fills your home with an aroma something like Thanksgiving Day. After that, it is pulled apart into small pieces of meat (hence the name carnita) and is roasted in the oven on a sheet tray until the outside is crisp and brown, while the inside is still soft and tender. Yum.
Browning the meat on the stovetop.
Return the meat to the pan, add spices (including cinnamon!), and liquid. Put in oven.
Three hours later--the meat is falling off the bone tender. Most of the liquid is evaporated.
Pull the meat into pieces and place on cooking sheet to return to the oven. Don't skip this step. It's the secret to the crispy outside.
Served simply with 2 layers of corn tortillas (I softened these over a gas flame first), chopped onion and cilantro.
Carnitas
You can get the recipe online at David Liebovitz’s Blog
And his book The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz
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