Tomato-bread salad

I have lots of delicious vegetables, and this is one of my favorite ways to eat them. The overall color is a bit pink, because of the beets, but it was a delicious salad. I recommend it. The quantities are all pretty relative, it just depends what you have on hand. I meant to put anchovies in it, but I forgot - I think that would make it taste even better.

Salad:
Makes enough to serve two as a side dish or one hungry person as a main dish

Chop everything roughly into cubes:

2 heirloom tomatoes
1 salad cucumber
1 red pepper or sunburst pepper
1/2 red onion
1 clove garlic
a whole bunch of cilantro, basil, or other fresh herbs
1 beet
1/2 avocado
two handfuls of croutons, preferably the homemade kind.

Dressing:
lemon juice
olive oil
salt

whisk to combine, taste, add whatever you think needs adding. I'd start with about half lemon juice and half olive oil, and go from there.

Croutons
Take a couple pieces of stale bread, or it doesn't have to be stale, that's just usually the way bread is when its not fresh out of the oven, cut into cubes, and toss with olive oil. Then bake for ~10 minutes in a 350F oven, until the croutons are crunchy on the outside.

Toss to combine, and eat immediately.

This week's plan

So, last week was under the budget, thanks to all the free grad student things. The freegan stars were aligned. This week, not so much, so I went down to Atkins Farm, by Holyoke college, to get my veggies, since someone had recommended it. From the outside it looks like the sort of place that will cost an arm and a leg, and maybe it would if you got sucked into buying the homemade baked goods and chocolate apples and other deliciousness, but I stayed strong, and only bought foods that were not for immediate consumption. They also have a fish counter and some local chicken and beef, as well as a very nice (if small) beer selection, so I would hazard a guess that I'll be back. I got out of there for just $17, but I had dropped $6 at the store over the weekend for eggs and tortillas and some other stuff, and after another $2 on tomatoes at Sunset Farm on my way home, I'm at my limit.

But I have such a bounty of beautiful vegetables! I'm psyched. Spent some time cooking this morning, and now I have some whole wheat rosemary rolls for munching on with my gazpacho soup and making into beet-goat cheese sandwiches. Should have taken a picture of that. Other things I'd like to make are a tomato tart, apple crisp, and some sort of tomato-bread salad. Hopefully Barry the basil plant is ready for me to harvest some of his leaves...

I have enough kale for a family of eight right now, so expect some more kale dishes soon. Although I might stick with the tried and true favorites - kale chips and kale and eggs. Maybe I'll try a kale salad, that would be seriously branching out.

7-layer dip tacos

I made some delicious baked beans (texas style, not sweet) over the weekend, and for lack of a desire to cook tonight, turned them into a mess of things on a plate sort of wrapped in tacos. I still have leftover pulled pork, so that went in there, plus an heirloom tomato, avocado, a ton of cilantro, an ear of corn, and a sunrise pepper. And some salt. I had just been to the farm stand, hence all the delicious veggies. It got messy fast, though, my corn tortillas are too dry to hold a taco shape, so the stuff fell out the bottom and out the ends. Hopeless. But delicious!

This made enough for four people, so, just take that as a warning. Or use half of each veggie.


The layering was: Pulled pork, beans, greek yogurt (tastes like sour cream, but better!), cilantro, tomatoes, avocado, corn, salt.

Oven-dried tomatoes

With the massive quantities of tomatoes that Sunset farm is selling for $1/lb, it would be a crime not to get enough to dry some. Because sundried tomatoes are awesome. I've oven-dried tomatoes before, and like those other instances, I wasn't totally pleased with this - seemed like just a bit too much work for the product. Anyway, they do taste delicious, and I can't wait to use them in stuff!


I started with 4lbs of tomatoes, which was just enough to fill two sheet pans. I sliced the tomatoes, I think they were closer to 1/2" rather than the 1/4" I was aiming for, and laid them out on the sheet pans and salted them. The salt helps pull out some water. After about half an hour of that, I squeezed out some of the water with a clean dishtowel, and then put them back on the pans, drizzled with some oil and salt, and put in the oven at 200F, for many hours. I should mention, I sucked the juice out of most of the tomatoes - anything you can do to dry them more =).



I checked first after 2 hrs... still pretty fresh-looking. I checked again after 4hrs, and they were a little better. Checked at 6, and they needed more time. By 8 hours they were looking done. I'm not sure I'd leave these drying overnight, even though it did take 8 hours... its worth it to keep checking them. I may have let them go a bit too far, but they have that perfect chewiness to them right now. Now to learn how to store them...

Chocolate coconut cupcakes

One of the food blogs I enjoy is www.loveandoliveoil.com, written by Lindsay and Taylor. They make tasty food and take good photos of it, which I suppose is a useful quality for food blogging. I make experimental food and usually forget the photo. Hmmm.

I used her recipe for the cupcakes I made for Ed's party. I wanted to make car-bomb cupcakes, but I didn't feel like going out to buy Guinness and eggs and sour cream, all things I didn't happen to have on hand. Her cupcakes are vegan, which means I didn't have to go and buy eggs and milk and stuff, and they use coconut milk, which I had on hand. I used the recipe for the chocolate raspberry truffle cupcakes, minus the whole raspberry bit, and they were delicious and dark and moist and not too sweet, which made them perfect for the Bailey's cream cheese frosting, which is good enough to eat on its own, actually.

I've reprinted the recipe below, in my own words for my own records. I'll be making these cupcakes again, as they were pretty simple to make and tasted quite good. They were also strikingly black, thanks to the special dark baking cocoa, and that made a nice contrast to the white-ish frosting, very pretty.

Chocolate coconut cupcakes
Made 11.5 cupcakes

1C coconut milk (shake the can well before opening)
1/3C oil
1 tsp vanilla
3/4C sugar (I used brown because that was what I had)
1C flour
1/3C Hershey's special dark cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350F. Mix all the wet ingredients together, and in a separate bowl mix all the dry goods. Mix dry into wet. Stir just to combine. Plop large spoonfuls into lined cupcake tins, and bake for 18-22 minutes. Mine took 19 minutes.

Top with Bailey's cream cheese frosting. It makes any bad day immediately better.

The perks of grad studenting: free food!

So, I was doing quite well with this concept of "budget" last week, until I went to buy stuff for Ed's birthday party, which was on Friday. But I don't think that should count for the overall food budget, because its not like you are throwing a party every week. Anyway, the damage from that was $19 at the grocery store for curry and cupcake ingredients and then $65 on cheese and beer, but that counts as a birthday present, not as food shopping. It was some darn good cheese and beer!

From last week, all the veggies from Sunset farm got eaten, there had been some small leftovers and I cooked those up for lunches over the weekend (complement rice and beans real well), since I had to bring lunch to this Nordic Symposium thing I was at. Barry the basil plant is doing much better, actually pointing his stems sky-ward (his only access to light is a skylight). There is one tupperware of zucchini-eggplant-tomato stew stuff in the freezer, as well as half a bag of spinach. Also in the freezer is one tupperware of pasta sauce with grass fed beef, I should eat that soon.

I've decided to exercise my powers of grad student this week and see if I can get through the entire week without shopping. It'll be a stretch, but there are a couple free lunches to help me out. I have yogurt and oatmeal and nuts and dried fruit for breakfasts, a TON of pulled pork from Ed (he worked a pig roast all day Friday, and got to keep some leftovers), half a cabbage I stole from our fridge at home, some cilantro, onions, and some bread. Ali fed me dinner yesterday, I get free lunch tomorrow, we're going out to Bub's bbq after rollerskiing on Wednesday, I get free lunch Friday, and so all I really have to do is make it through Thursday. And then hope Ed will feed me over the weekend. We should still have leftover cheese and beer, that'll get me the calories I need... Bub's shouldn't be that expensive, so that'll be ~$10 for the week. Woot. Right, this satisfies tasty and cheap but definitely not healthy...

In a normal training week, I'd die on as little food as I've just listed, but with this stupid knee injury, I've only been training like a normal person, and its scary how quickly my appetite withered and died. Sigh. I miss my 3-hr mountain runs...

Tomato-basil salad

Its almost a caprese salad, except I didn't have any mozzarella. There also wasn't too much basil, because I didn't want to kill Barry the basil plant. Speaking of Barry, I finally transplanted him from his miniscule supermarket pot to a more healthy-sized pot, and I fear for his health. The roots were quite intertwined, and a fair bit of roots fell out as I separated some of the smaller plants. I've fed him sunlight and water, but he is quite droopy. I hope he makes it. I have a somewhat notorious black thumb.

Anyway, if Barry is going to croak, I'm harvesting all those leaves and having a basil feast. He also got shaken up a bit just before transplanting, when I fell down the stairs while carrying him. Whoops. I should look where I'm going and not wear slippery socks.

Barry before the traumatic transplantation.

Back on track, the salad was delicious. This isn't something worth making if you don't have the freshest, tastiest, meatiest heirloom tomatoes you can get your paws on - I happened to have just some of those, and this was the perfect way to showcase their perfection. At $1/lb, I feel like I'm really ripping off Sunset Farms, but hey, they set the price.

Tomato-Basil salad

1 large, delicious, heirloom tomato
6-20 basil leaves
salt
olive oil

Sharpen your knife. Then slice the tomato into ~1/8" slices, and arrange them artistically on a plate. Sprinkle with salt, and drizzle with olive oil. Roll up the basil leaves together and chiffonnade them, then sprinkle them on top. Try not to drool too much while eating, its that good. But I also have a love-affair with tomatoes.

Barry, post-transplant. Droopy.

Zucchini with caramelized onions

Caramelized onions make everything taste better, including zucchini. Not that pan-fried zucchs are bad, just that they're better with onions. The only other flavor additives were olive oil, salt, and some dried thyme. Quite satisfying, in the end, but not exactly something I'd serve with the mind to be fancy. I'd come home for lunch, so I made a big pile of this, served on top of a heap of spaghetti squash (side note - I wasn't sure what type of squash it was, just that it was cute and yellow, so I figured I'd treat it like it was spaghetti squash and hope for the best, which ended up being a perfectly acceptable strategy). I also had a tomato-basil salad, which was so good it deserves its own post. All those veggies are filling, but I probably should have made something more, given how hungry I was by dinnertime.

Zucchini with caramelized onions

1 zucchini
1 onion
olive oil
salt to taste
other dried herbs, optional

Peel the onion, slice it in half length-wise, then cut it into half-moons. These'll make those nice stringy caramelized bits that taste so good. Heat some oil in a frying pan to medium - medium-low, and add the onions. Sprinkle on some kosher salt. These will cook for about 10 minutes before they start sticking, after 10 minutes they should be browning a bit around the edges and tasting sweet. You'll have to stir occasionally.

I cut the zucchs into half moons, you can slice or dice them any way you want. I tossed them into the frying pan after the onions had been going for 10 minutes, added some salt, and cooked for another 5-10 minutes. Some people like their zucchini very well done. I like it on the crunchy side.

Serve as is, or over some sort of starch.

Fried potatoes and ratatouille stew

Last week, I had made a ratatouille pizza, and that had only used about half of each vegetable. I sort of forgot about the two tomatoes, half a zucch, half an eggplant, and three tomatillos languishing in the bottom of my fridge when I went to buy new veggies this week, so first order of business was to use these poor guys up. The fridge runs too cold, and I have the bottom shelf, so all my veggies tend to get too cold. This meant that the tomatillos and tomatoes were not very happy, the only way to eat them and enjoy them would be if they were cooked down.

My delicious heirloom tomatoes and peaches are not being stored in the fridge. Learned that lesson.

Anyway, I wanted to use some of the potatoes I'd gotten, and potatoes taste best with lots of fat and salt, so I decided to fry them, in slices, with some onion and the two links of sausage that I had living in the freezer. Quite delicious. The ratatouille stew gloop was a sort of side dish to that.


Its been cold enough at night recently that a good, hearty, greasy meal was just the thing. I should probably limit these sorts of meals in the near future, since I'm on a sort of limited amount of training due to a knee injury... but whatevs, olive oil is good for you.


I had half a purple potato dying a slow death in the fridge along with those ratatouille veggies, so I fried that one up too. That's the random blue thing in with the other potatoes.

Pan-fried potatoes
Made enough for two meals

A couple handfuls of small red potatoes
Olive oil
Kosher salt
1/2 onion

Wash the potatoes, then slice them into ~1/4" slices. Put a decent amount of oil into a fairly wide, flat-bottomed frying pan, and heat that up to medium-low-ish. Once the oil is shimmering, put down the potato slices, as many as will fit in one layer, and sprinkle with salt. You'll probably be doing a couple batches, I did three.

As those cook on the first side, finely dice the onion.

After about 5 minutes, check the bottom of one of the potato slices. If it is golden brown, or has brown spots, flip the potatoes. If it is just white, leave them cooking. Once the bottoms are golden brown, flip over all the potato slices. Once you've flipped them, add about a third of the onion to the interstitial spaces so its touching the pan. Make sure there is still enough oil in the pan to keep things sizzling. Once the other side is golden brown, the taters are done.

Repeat this process as many times as you need to to finish cooking the rest of the potatoes. Enjoy!



Ratatouille stew
Made enough for three meals as a side
*Note*
This is a recipe that is using up old veggies. For god's sake, don't go following it to the exact letter - be creative and use up your own veggies. Or use these veggies and use the whole thing, rather than half. The eggplant and tomatoes are what give it the gloopy-stewyness.

1/2 eggplant
1/2 zucchini
1/4 summer squash
2 tomatoes
3 tomatillos
1 small round hot red pepper
1 orange-y green pepper
1/2 onion (the other half got used in the potatoes)
kosher salt
olive oil
dried thyme leaves (rosemary would have been better), any dried herbs work.

Put some oil in a frying pan. Dice the onion. Sweat the onion with some salt, then add the peppers. Chop everything else, put it in the pan. Put a lid on the frying pan and let it cook down for 10 minutes or so, stirring occasionally and tasting too, for salt and other herbs. Once it looks pretty gloopy and stew-like, you're done. Enjoy with bread, or as a side dish, or on pasta, or on rice, or on potatoes... you get the idea.

The sausage links, I just fried in the pan, flipping every once in a while.

Anne Leith's awesome salad

I think that is basically the best name for this salad. Its a salad, in that there are vegetables in it, but it could also be an appetizer (served with bread) or a full meal (served with more bread). I added more stuff to Anne's base salad, and changed the dressing due to a lack of some crucial ingredients (soy sauce), but any time you mix avocados with perfect heirloom tomatoes, its hard to go wrong.

I really meant to take a photo with the blurry iphone, but I didn't bring it, and its not like there was any left over. Use your imaginations, and then make it for yourself, you will not be disappointed. I don't have an Ed-rating for this, since he wasn't here to devour it with me, but I do have an Ali-, Gail-, and Peter-rating, and it passed with flying colors for all of them.

Anne's awesome salad (+ Alex's changes)
Served four, as a side course

1 avocado
2 perfectly ripe heirloom tomatoes - go for the best quality you can find, here.
Basil leaves
~1/4lb marinated mozzarella balls
~10 kalamata olives
1-2C chopped spinach
1/2 cucumber
Dressing, or a nice pesto in lieu of dressing
Salt, to taste

Your serving dish for this should be wide and flat - to showcase the beauty of this salad. It can be made in a bowl, but looks nicer when on a serving dish. The spinach and cucumber aren't part of Anne's original salad, and don't really do anything except add more green stuff to round out the total volume to feed four people...

Coarsely chop the spinach, and put that down as your first layer. Peel the cucmber and cut that into slices, put that on top of the spinach, that is your second layer. Slice the tomato (use a really sharp knife) into rounds, and lay those on top of the salad. Sprinkle on some salt. Slice the avocado, and layer that on top of the tomato. Slice the mozzarella rounds into 3-4 slices, sprinkle those on top, then halve the olives lengthwise, and sprinkle those on top too. Chiffonnade the basil - the more the better, but I didn't want to kill Barry the basil plant by taking too many of his leaves this early. Salt the whole thing gently.

The dressing was mostly olive oil. An oily pesto would work well too, and Anne swears by soy sauce on her avocados.

Dressing:
Makes far more than you need at once

1/2 onion
1 clove garlic
1 red pepper
dried herbs of your choosing
a couple pieces of lime rind
juice of a lime
Olive oil to fill a 1C tupperware

The idea here is to let the oil steep in the flavors of the dressing, and then just drizzle the oil on top. Use a tupperware as your mixing bowl/storage container, then you can have flavored oil for other salad dressings, too. So smart. Chop the onion, garlic, and pepper - if you want it really spicy, keep the seeds, otherwise discard them. Put everything into a tupperware, add the oil until its all covered, put on the lid and shake to combine. Let it sit for at least an hour, then shake before serving, and serve with a spoon, to drizzle the oil over the salad.

Make this salad.

New Twist

So, I've started grad school. This means that my salary has taken a hit, I now make about half what I'm used to. Of course so far its been pretty easy going, and I get an education out of it, so I'm not complaining, but I've had to tighten my budget a bit. Belts can stay loose. So, I think this blog might head towards the $/week variety. I'm trying to keep myself on $25-30/week, but of course I don't really count weekends since I sort of assume Ed won't let me go too hungry, although he did suggest that I go hunt some rabbits for us last night. We ended up eating pretzels instead. That is probably not a good thing.

Anyway, I think I'm going to blog about what I buy and what I make out of it. I might just revert again to using this as online recipes, but we'll see how it morphs.

I stopped by Sunset farm stand during lunch (ach, I should know not to go shopping on an empty stomach...), and then hit up the Big Y (local supermarket) to round out the week's goodies. It was kind of expensive because I'm bringing a salad to Ali's tonight, and I wanted to make an avocado-tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, and those are expensive ingredients. Oh well, its delicious and healthy, therefore worth it! Tasty, healthy, cheap - gotta get at least two of the three...

Sunset farm:
$3 - 3lb tomatoes
$1.25 - chard and kale
$0.50 - some sort of yellow winter squash
$2 - musk melon
$2 - heavy bag of small potatoes
$1 - two beautiful striped zucchinis
$0.25 - two cute little hot red peppers. They're round. Not sure what kind, or how hot they are.
Total: $10

Big Y
$3.00 - kalamata olives and marinated mozzarella balls for salad (~1/2lb)
$0.56 - 2 bananas
$0.34 - 1 lime
$0.69 - 1 cucumber
$1.44 - crimini mushrooms
$1.50 - bag of spinach
$3.00 - 2 avocados
$1.98 - a basil plant - I have high hopes for this little guy, I'm going to transplant him to a big pot, and water him, and put him in the sunlight, and not eat all of his photosynthesizing surfaces all at once, and I'll name him Barry the Basil plant. Usually I kill my basil plants early on in life by removing and eating all their leaves. Barry will live.
$1.39 - pumpkin muffin. This turned into lunch, with a tomato. Not so good on the healthy side of things... whoops.
Total: $13.90

Total total: $23.90

I suppose I should add another disclaimer which involves the stuff already in my pantry/freezer - that's getting used for stuff, and I no longer have any idea how much it cost. So, it'll bring the total up to some unknown value. But I think this is a good project. Lets see how long I keep it up!

Ratatouille pizza

I had half the pizza dough from last time in the freezer, so I decided to use it up with some of the veggies I'd just gotten from the little farm stand by the university. I decided that a ratatouille-like combination of veggies would be good, so I sliced everything thinly and layered it over some of the basil hummus/pesto stuff and under some ricotta salata. Which you could make on your own, all it takes is milk and lemon juice, but the small block of it at the store only cost me $3.36, and I only used half.

The dough was my standard pizza dough:
1C lukewarm water
1 tbs yeast
1 tbs sugar
1/4C olive oil
1 tbs salt
~3C flour

Dissolve the yeast and sugar into the water, and once the yeast is proofed, mix in everything else. Keep adding flour a cup at a time, until the dough is dry enough to knead with your hands. Knead for 5-10 minutes, then let it rest on a floured surface while you prep the veggies.

This dough freezes really well - I used a version that had been frozen for a couple weeks, and that really made it stretchy, so I could stretch the pizza crust rather than roll it out. Something about gluten continuing to develop even in the freezer? I wouldn't know, talking out of my ass.

Ratatouille pizza
1/4 of a medium-sized eggplant
1/4 of a zucchini
1/4 of a summer squash
1 tomato
~1/2C pesto, optional
~1C crumbled ricotta salada
Kosher salt
pizza dough

Slice the veggies very thinly. Salt both sides of them, and let them sit for 10 minutes, or more if you have time. Do this with the tomato, too. This pulls out some of the water, and keeps them from making the pizza crust soggy.

While they sit there sweating, you can roll out the pizza dough. Mine was enough to fill a regular-sized cookie sheet. Once you've rolled/stretched/cajoled your pizza dough into a large enough shape, sprinkle some coarse cornmeal onto the pan, then gently put the dough down, stretching to make it fit the corners. For a 3C batch of dough, half the batch stretched to a full sheet makes a very thin-crusted pizza. That is how I like it, but some people (ahem. Ed.) like thicker crusts. In their cases, I'd use all the dough in one pan.

Spread pesto over the pizza. I used up some of that pesto/hummus stuff I'd made. If you don't have pesto, I'd recommend at least spreading some olive oil over the crust, it'll just make things taste better.

By now the veggies should be done sweating. Rinse them in a colander, then dry them with a towel. Yeah, its weird, but it keeps the dough from getting soggy. Spread the towel out on a counter, lay a batch of rinsed veggies on the towel, then put another towel on top and push down to extract more water. Do this for all the veggies. Yeah, it'll take 5 minutes, but its worth it.

Layer the sliced veggies over the pesto, in whatever artistic manner you feel like adopting. I did rows of different veggies. Sprinkle some more olive oil on top of that. Crumble the ricotta on top.

Bake at 500F for 10-20 minutes. Depends on the thickness of the crust. The cheese should be slightly browned on top when you pull out the pizza. Just a warning, this cheese doesn't melt at all, so its likely to fall off when you eat the pizza. You could try putting it under the veggies, or just use mozzarella like normal pizzas. This was an experiment, and I thought it tasted good.

Pizza!

This was sort of a use-up-ingredients pizza, but pretty tasty anyway. Pesto/hummus (its not pesto, but not hummus...), onions, mushrooms, spinach, sardines, and cheddar. That's sort of a strange combination now that I think about it, but it tasted good. The best part is the hummus/pesto stuff.



The hummus/pesto was basically a ton of basil, some chickpeas, some toasted walnuts (they turned it gray, not very appetizing-looking, despite being delicious), some toasted garlic, salt, and lots of lots of oil trying to bring it together into a smooth paste. Didn't quite work out like that, but it works as a spread and tastes delicious.

The onions got sweated, as did the mushrooms, and the spinach, before I put them on the pizza. The dough was fairly standard, ~2C of flour to a cup of water and ~1/4C oil, and lots of salt. And yeast. No real rise time, just while I was prepping vegetables. We'll call it free-form pizza, since there isn't much of a recipe to go along with it. Worth making all the same though!