Lemony shrimp and pasta

A few years ago, Ali was living in Amherst, and I would stay with her every week or two when I'd show up to talk with my adviser and do some actual work for grad school, sort of alternating between Ali's house and Peter and Gail's house. Anyway, Ali had a stack of Cooking Light magazines, I think they'd been gifted to her when Ross and Sam moved out of the country. This was a recipe, roughly, from one of those magazines, and it was quite good. Not just with the qualifier "for a Cooking Light recipe", but on its own! The bright and tangy lemon-mustard sauce brightened the pasta, and the capers provided bright little salty notes. I wanted to make it again, and amazingly, I actually found the original recipe online! This is a good one - quick, easy, and relatively cheap, depending on how many shrimp you use. Below is how I remade this recipe, since I'm incapable of following an actual recipe.

Pasta with shrimp and chickpeas

1 box Pasta

Shrimp (vary the amount based on how many shrimp you want - we went with a half pound for two of us)

1 can chickpeas

several handfuls of fresh arugula

1 red onion

several spoonfuls of capers

1 clove garlic

olive oil

Sauce: 

1 lemon

1 spoonful dijon mustard

A splash of olive oil

a pinch or three of salt

a pinch or three of freshly ground pepper

Get your water boiling. Lots of it. Salt it.

Dice the onion, sweet on high heat in olive oil until there's some browned bits. Dice the garlic, add that to the pan and cook until it's starting to get fragrant. Cook the shrimp, a few minutes (2?) on each side, until they're just pink. When they're nearly done, throw in the capers, chickpeas, and arugula/spinach/swiss chard/baby lettuce of any sort to wilt, and once the greens are wilted, take off the heat.

Meanwhile, make the sauce - juice the lemon, mix with mustard and oil and salt and pepper, taste and adjust. 

Once the pasta is done (cook to your preferred cookedness), mix it all together. We got a solid four servings out of this, two for dinner and two for lunch.

Enjoy! 

Zucchini with tahini and feta

Ed saw a recipe somewhere, that he wanted to try, and who am I to complain about interesting new dinner ideas? This one turned out quite tasty, I think he got the idea from here. We used two different kinds of feta, because we had it - one for crumbling and one for frying. And the fried feta was AMAZING.  Good golly, go buy some firm feta and fry it, you'll be in love instantly.

Anyway, what we have here is a mishmash - there's a tahini sauce on the bottom. I wish I remembered what went into it. Lemon, salt, and probably a little water and/or olive oil.  Then rounds of zucchini, that we fried lightly on either side, as well as some rounds of the stem of a king oyster mushroom, since we had some of those in the fridge. Mushrooms fry up so nicely. We toasted the hazelnuts and crumbled the feta on top, and served with a few slabs of fried feta - slightly aged, I think, at least it tasted that way, and we got it from Sophia's, as we get all our tasty feta. We fried it in a little olive oil in a nonstick pan, and it was delicious. Oh, I mentioned that already? 

We'll make this again. Though, as is our wont, probably with totally different ingredients and methods.

Braised endives

One thing we'd really been enjoying through the winter and early spring this year were braised endives. I think we've finally settled on a "favorite" way to cook them. I've always loved just cutting them in half and frying them in a pan until they're done, but we've discovered that frying them first, in some butter for flavor and color, and then adding some liquid and braising them until they're done, that's the way to do it. The endives will just melt in your mouth, not in a mushy way, but in a silky way, with a little bit of crunch still at the root of the leaves. This braising obsession may be in part because we've started making lots of veggie stock - we've just been throwing all our veggie scraps into a big tupperware that we store in the freezer, and once every week or three we boil it all down into stock. So far we've had some interesting combinations. Don't bother saving your radish greens. And squash peelings are not good eats, either.

Anyway, we now have a surplus of vegetable stock. Here's a good way to use it up. Start with a pat of butter in a frying pan. Halve your endives lengthwise, and place into the melted butter. Salt the top, grind on some pepper, and leave them put over medium-ish heat for maybe 5-10 minutes, until you've got some nice color.  Once you're happy with the amount of browning, pour a cup or two of stock over the top, and let that simmer away for another 15-20 minutes, until it's easy to stick a fork into the tops of the endives. Pull them out of the braising liquid and grate some parmesan cheese on top, though obviously you could skip that step if you didn't have any cheese.

Simple and delicious.

Berry ricotta cake

This is a bit of a modification of a recipe that came from the Amateur Gourmet, who got the recipe from the Village Bakery. It looked too complicated in terms of measurements (1/4C + 2 tbs? I can't do math like that, are you kidding?), so I messed with the amounts of things until they fit the various measuring devices that I have in my house. This may be a bad approach to baking, but it tends to be the one I take... in the end, it was a success. Mostly. I felt like if you were eating the cake with your hands, it was too greasy, but maybe that's a sign that you shouldn't eat cake with your hands. Tasting the batter I was worried things would be too sweet, but it's fine once it cooks.  So, I declare success! Will definitely make again, because I love dense polenta cakes. I'm going to try leaving out the olive oil altogether, see if that makes it more of a finger food cake.

Ingredients:
1 stick of butter
3/4C sugar
1/4C olive oil
2 eggs
1 tbs vanilla
1 tbs honey
3/4C flour
1/2C cornmeal
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
1/2tsp salt
1C ricotta
1/4C greek yogurt (it called for sour cream, but we get our greek yogurt from Sophia's, and the consistency is basically that of sour cream. That ain't no diet greek yogurt. And, well, I didn't feel like going out and getting sour cream)
~1/2 package frozen raspberries

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the rest of the wet ingredients except the ricotta and sour cream. Combine the dry ingredients together. Mix wet and dry. Fold in the ricotta + sour cream.

Butter and flour a 9" diameter cake pan. Spread half the batter into the pan, top with berries. Spread the other half on top of that, and again top with berries. The amount of berries depends how obsessed you are with them!

Bake at 350F for 50 minutes.

(As you can see, I baked a little taster cake for myself, as well as the full-sized one for everyone else. Had to know how it would taste!)