Gazpacho, zucchini saute, and charred cabbage

This week has been a little tough eating enough veggies, because Ed went to VT on Thursday night and didn't bring any veggies with him. He didn't get back until Tuesday, and then I was out of town over the weekend, too, so all of a sudden I'm having too-much-food-not-enough-time anxiety. Anyway, we're back now, and of course Ed stopped by the farm on the way home and picked more green beans and basil and parsley and husk cherries, because clearly that's what we needed. Eep.

So anyway, first order of business was using up some zucchinis. Smitten Kitchen just posted an excellent idea of a recipe, involving lightly-sauteed zucchini matchsticks with buttery fried almonds and some peels of parmesan cheese. While I think maybe a squeeze of lemon would have been good, I'll be saving that for the next one.
https://smittenkitchen.com/2007/08/quick-zucchini-saute/


The other thing I made to go with my pile of zucchinis, besides some steamed corn on the cob (can't go wrong there), was a charred cabbage dish. I like the deep flavor of broiled brassicas, especially when paired with bacon and toasted walnuts. I decided to lighten things up a little and mixed in some lemon zest and cilantro, and the end result was delicious and balanced. Couldn't get enough!

Also, fresh corn. mmmmmmm.



I also cooked up some beet chips. I declare this a most excellent way to consume beets. Simply peel, slice into ~1/8" rounds, and bake a 300F until they start to curl. I dunno, 20 minutes? Then flip, and cook another 20min or so, with a little salt. You're essentially dehydrating them. I took them out to eat them when there was still a little chew, and they were quite tasty. I'll make this again.



Salad of sliced raw beets, cucumbers, savory, and red onions and poppy seeds. Refreshing and sweet.



Gazpacho! It doesn't get any simpler, if you have a blender. You can get all sorts of crazy with gazpacho, but this is a pretty basic one. Two tomatoes, two cucumbers (peeled), about half an onion, a clove of garlic, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and salt to taste.

You can't have gazpacho without croutons, so I toasted up some leftover sourdough bread in butter, and chopped that up. And then browned some corn kernels from a cob, and chopped some parsley. I mean the gazpacho was pretty amazing on its own, but the additions certainly helped!





New flowers!




It may be sideways, but this was a pretty good one by Ed - salad of cooked onion, garlic, and carrot, then sauteed some green beans on top of that, and combined with boiled beets and raw tomatoes and husk cherries and topped with a poached egg.

Tasty and sweet.

We still have to use up half a cabbage, a head of kale and a head of collards, and three more zucchinis. Tonight will be a very green dinner... or maybe I'll blanch the collards and freeze for later. We'll see.

Unsuccessful soup

Not everything turns out perfectly.  This soup, for example.  Was perfectly edible, but didn't taste all that awesome.  It was a broth of chicken stock, curry paste, and coconut milk, and I think the curry paste made things too oily.  The soba noodles were good, anyway, as were the kelp strands.  It only gets featured here, because it's a lovely yellow color, in a blue bowl, and I think that's pretty.  So, yeah, not a success, but a very pretty little bowl of soup.

French Onion Soup

After rescuing some cheese from the Gagarins' fridge (they lost power, and were leaving for Turkey, so I took away some perishable stuff), we have lots of cheese. It's pretty yummy stuff, one block is aged and one is smoked, both sort of semi-soft cheddar-like cheeses, not sure what they actually are. Anyway, we decided that French onion soup would be a good way to use the cheese, so embarked on that endeavor. It wasn't too hard, actually, but most recipes call for much more cooking time than we used. Hey, we were hungry. We did let the onions fully caramelize, but didn't both cooking the broth that much longer. End result was quite delicious, although anything with toasty bread and melted cheese is going to be good, in my book.

French Onion Soup
Made enough for two people

4 onions
olive oil
kosher salt
~2C chicken stock
~2tbs balsamic vinegar
1/4C apple cider (optional)
several sprigs of thyme
1 bay leaf

~2C croutons
~1.5C grated cheese. Swiss or gruyere or emmental are probably best.

First step: caramelize the onions. Basically just cook them until they turn golden brown. We cut them in half, and then into slices, so they made long pieces of onion, and then cooked them in a dutch oven with some olive oil and a pinch of salt until they were delicious and brown and soft. Keep the heat relatively low; you don't want to burn them, just cook them. Stir occasionally. Add oil or butter as necessary, although we were fine this time.

Meanwhile, turn some old bread into croutons. Cut into pieces and bake for 10-15min, until it's pretty hard. If they're soft, they'll just turn to goo when added to the soup.

Once the onions are caramelized, add the chicken stock and the vinegar and the thyme and bay leaf. If we'd had any white wine, we would have added that, too. We let that cook for another 10 minutes or so, and then called it done.

Season the soup to taste for salt and pepper. Then pour it into soup bowls that are oven safe. Something with straight sides and a narrow mouth would be best, but we just used regular bowls. Top the soup with croutons, and then the cheese. Put the bowls on a baking sheet (to catch drips), and broil until the cheese has melted and is starting to brown a bit.

It's done! eat.





Headless Ed eating onion soup.

Butternut squash soup

This is a fairly straight-forward soup recipe, but what really makes it are all the delectable toppings. The soup is fine without them, but better with. This got a good Ed-rating, for anyone who was wondering.

First, roast the squash. I peeled it afterward, you could peel it before, it doesn't really matter. I chopped my squash into chunks, tossed with olive oil, sprinkled on some sliced onions and chopped sage leaves, and roasted about 15min at 400F.


Then I put it in a pot, with some good chicken broth. I happened to have made the broth recently - chicken bones, carrots, celery, onion, bay leaves, rosemary, and garlic, all boiled down for a few hours. Home made broth is nice and all, but you could have used boullion and water. Add enough liquid that you've almost covered the chunks of squash, but there are still some chunks sticking up.

I added a rind of parmesan cheese at this point - we happened to have one hanging out in the freezer. I also peeled and chopped 1/4 of a granny smith apple, and put that in there, along with a couple chunks of fresh ginger. I recommend a bay leaf, too.

Simmer the soup for a while, maybe 20-30 more minutes. Remove the parmesan rind (unless it dissolved completely and you can't find it), and then blend the soup. I used a stick blender. Less stuff to wash. Pour in a tablespoon or so of cream, and stir that in. Serve in bowls. You could grate some more parmesan cheese on top, if you wanted.

All the stuff on top made it even more delicious. The glob of which stuff in the middle is greek yogurt - I'm not sure I'd do that again, it was a bit too tangy. But the caramelized onions, and oyster mushrooms fried up in butter until they're crunchy, and cream, those are all very necessary additions.

Hearty turkey lentil stew

I was going to just make a lentil soup, today, but then I realized that I could totally put turkey in it. Still not nearing the end of the turkey leftovers, which have now migrated to the freezer. Anyway, this is quite glop-ish, but, its tasty and warm and fairly comforting, if you're at the end of a cold, rainy, exhausting December day.

Lentil glop stew
Made lots and lots, but that is because I put lots and lots of veggies into it. Basically three huge servings

~1/2C dry lentils
1 can diced tomatoes
1C turkey stock
1/2 broccoli
1/2 zucchini
1/2 eggplant
a bunch of mushrooms
2 cloves garlic
1/2 green pepper
1C chopped kale
olive oil
1 bay leaf
salt
pepper

Start by putting on a pot of brown rice. This is a very brown-rice-appropriate sort of meal. Yea hippies!

Put the lentils, turkey broth, tomatoes, and bay leaf into a pot and bring that to a boil. Once it boils, lower the the heat to a simmer.

Meanwhile, in a frying pan, cook all the veggies. Once they're as done as you like them (i.e. cooked, but with some bite, still), pull that pan off the heat, and taste the lentils. Salt and pepper them, and if they're done, dump in the veggies, and serve. If they're not done, wait. (instructions for how to make lentils: cook until done).

It took about 20 minutes, total.

Enjoy with rice, or bread, or just on its own.

Turkey Thai curry soup

Yup, more turkey leftovers posts! In this one, I make a curry. With lots of lime and cilantro. All the other stuff that goes into it is optional, but I recommend going heavy on the veggies, it tastes better and is better for you. Pretty much everything in this recipe is optional except the curry paste, coconut milk, lime, and cilantro. So, go wild...

Turkey Thai curry
Made about three servings

1 can coconut milk
~2tbs Thai red curry paste (I have some Thai Kitchen brand kicking around, used that)
1C turkey stock
1 lime
~1C cilantro
~2C chopped, cooked turkey
1/2 jalapeno
2 cloves garlic
a bunch of mushrooms
1/2 broccoli
1/2 eggplant
1/2 zucchini
1/2 green pepper
Oil
Salt

Heat some oil in a big frying pan. Chop the garlic and the jalapeno, and throw those in. Chop all the other veggies into bite sized pieces, and throw it into the pan, but reserve about 2 tbs of chopped cilantro for garnish. Once its all in the pan, add the coconut milk and curry paste - taste as you go with the curry paste, you might not want that much if you don't like spicy things, but the more you add, the more it tastes like curry. Also, its not on the ingredients list, but I highly recommend putting in some fresh ginger, too. Zest the lime, and put the zest into the curry. Add the turkey broth and the turkey, make sure everything is mixed together, and let it simmer away for 5-10 minutes, until the veggies are at a state where you like to eat them.

Once the veggies are cooked, pull the pan off the heat, and serve over a heap of rice, or just in a bowl as a soup, garnished with some cilantro. Squeeze lime juice over the top. If you want it more soupy, add more turkey broth, if you want it more curry-like, add less broth.


Also, use all your leftover veggies tomorrow, in the hearty turkey lentil stew.

I make a darn good chicken stew

So the last couple weeks have been decidedly not-normal in the whole $30/week thing. Mostly its been because we've had friends in Amherst, and dinners at Peter and Gail's house, and Ali's house, and eating out way too much, and then a sudden trip to Boston to go vote, and basically, life just got crazy. I have been shopping, last week I bought corn flakes, and this week I bought two boxes of corn flakes (buy one get one free!). Yeah, basically I've just been scrounging around and coming up with food, somehow. Sometimes, its cereal for dinner. I have actually cooked things, and we've cooked things at home too, but with no camera, it just doesn't seem worth writing about. Sirloin tips - get some sirloin tips, those were delicious, and only $6/lb from Whole Foods, when all Ed and I could agree on for dinner was that we wanted something bloody.

Anyway, today I took a photo, and it was actually a very tasty recipe. I had some frozen chicken drumsticks, from when Ed went to the fresh-killed poultry place, and I also had some very floppy and almost dead celery and carrots. So, chicken stew it became. I think this would get a good Ed-rating, but he isn't in Amherst, so all I can do is guess. But its plenty rich (I DO have butter), and a bit spicy thanks to the floppy jalapeno I found in the carrot bag, and quite delicious paired with crunchy-on-the-outside, flaky-and-tender-on-the-inside biscuits. This was a darn good meal!


Chicken Stew with biscuits
Made 2-3 servings, depends how hungry you are

2 drumsticks
3 carrots
3 sticks of celery
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil
1 zucchini
rosemary
1 jalapeno
chicken stock (or water)
1 bay leaf
1/2 potato
2 tbs butter
2-3 tbs flour

First things first, get about two cups of chicken stock (or water) boiling in a medium-sized pot. Once its boiling, add the bay leaf, the drumsticks, one carrot broken into 3-4 chunks, and the flowery tops of the celery that you'd normally not eat. You'll pull out the carrot and celery chunks in a bit. Reduce the heat from boiling to simmering, and leave it be for ~30min.

For the veggies, heat some oil in a pan, then add the diced onion. Once that is sweated, add the finely diced garlic and about a tablespoon of rosemary. Stir that around until it smells fragrant. Add the diced pepper, which is totally optional, by the way, but I liked the heat it added. Add the chopped celery and carrots, and let that cook away until the carrots are soft. Then you can add the zucchini. Take that pan off the heat once things are cooked.

As all this stuff cooks, prepare the BISCUITS! Apparently, I've never written about biscuits on this blog, so the recipe I used is below. It loosely follows Alton Brown's biscuit recipe, which I'm sure is much better, but, I didn't feel like looking it up, so I just used this one, which worked.


Biscuits
Made 12 lumpy biscuits

2C all purpose flour
1tbs baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 stick butter - grated
3 egg yolks *
1C milk (skim)

*Use 2 eggs, normally. I just happened to make cookies that called for 3 egg whites early today, so I had extra egg yolks, and figured I'd use them up.

Mix together the flour, salt, and baking powder in a big bowl. Using the big holes on a square cheese grater, grate the butter into the flour. This puts it into little chunks, or if you have a pastry cutter, I hear those work, too. Use your fingers and work the butter and flour together with your finger tips, for exactly 37 seconds (this is according to Alton Brown). The butter grates better if it is frozen, but mine was only refrigerated, and it worked out.

In a separate bowl, mix the eggs and milk. Dump that into the dry stuff. Mix just until its combined, no longer. Plop 12 little heaps of biscuit batter on a greased baking sheet, and bake for, oh, 20 minutes or so, at 400F. Keep checking after 15 minutes, and take the biscuits out when they are golden brown, and the chunky bits are darker brown. They'll be crispy on the outside, and flaky and tender on the inside. Delicious!

Now back to the stew. When you deem the chicken to be cooked, take out the celery and carrot chunks, and drop the diced, half a potato into the pot. Meanwhile, make a roue. Melt the 2tbs of butter, and whisk in about 2 tbs of flour. I eyeballed it. It turned into a thick pate a choux, I think that is what its called - looked like batter of some sort. I dumped that into the stew, and whisked for a while, and the broth got thicker. Then I took out the chicken, used two forks to remove the meat from the bones, and dumped in the veggies. Voila! Chicken stew. Serve with biscuits. Perfect for cold, rainy days like this one...

Eating PRO on the go, 2010: Lentil soup

I actually remembered a camera, but it doesn't do much to make this meal look appetizing. Its a pretty simple one, but tasty and healthy, which is good enough for me on a race day. We brought some canned red curry paste, and my little plastic baggies of spices, which is why I have various spices and stuff listed in the ingredients - if I didn't have them, I probably wouldn't bother buying them, since its so expensive that way.

Lentil Soup
Serves 5-6 people, depending on how hungry you are.
1/2lb lentils, we used green ones
1/2 can diced tomatoes
2C chicken stock (made from leftover chicken when we bought a whole chicken instead of just chicken breasts for the pasta)
1 bay leaf
A couple carrots
A couple stalks of celery
1/2 of a ginormous onion
4 cloves of garlic
1 bunch of collard greens
curry paste
A bay leaf
soy sauce

Serve with some brown rice.

Put the lentils in a big pot with the bay leaf, tomatoes, chicken stock, a generous helping of soy sauce (we're a little short on salt), and as much curry paste as you would like - we used ~2 tablespoons of it. Add water to cover the lentils, more water for more soupy lentils, less water for less soupy lentils. Bring that to a boil, while you prep the vegetables. Once it boils, drop the heat back to a simmer.

Chop the carrot and celery into pretty little pieces, rinse and chop the collards. Slice the onion into long slices - you'll be pan-frying the onion and garlic, because that tastes better. Put the carrots and celery into the soup. Put some oil in a pan, and bring that up to a medium-high heat. Add the onion, and stir those around for 5-10 minutes, until they're just starting to brown (but not burn), then add the chopped garlic, and stir that around until its just golden brown. Add that to the soup. Simmer everything for a while, until the lentils taste cooked and the carrots and celery are cooked.

Heat some olive oil

Potato-Leek soup

Mama used to call this "potage", which I think just means soup, but whatever. Potage is potato leek soup. I think at one point she gave me the recipe, its similar to my recipes, using the word "about" many times and nothing is definite. This is a variation on the usual potage, because it has some kale in it. I had used the green part of the leek for something else, and I was worried the soup wouldn't be green enough. So, I added kale. And bacon, because everything is better with bacon...

Potato-leek (and kale and bacon) soup
1 large potato
1 leek
3 pieces of bacon
~1C kale
2C chicken broth (or two boullion cubes)
Water to cover
1 scallion for ganish, or chives, those are pretty too.

Chop up the bacon into little pieces, and cook it in a pan to render out most of the fat. While that cooks (it'll take 15-20min, don't try to rush it...), chop up the leek and rinse it well. Those things grow in a pile o' shit, you don't want to eat that. Drain off about half the bacon grease, and add the leek with some salt. Put the chicken broth on to boil, peel and chop the potato and add it to the broth. Add water as needed to barely cover the potato. Rinse the kale and add it to the soup. Once the leek is soft and starting to taste a little sweet, add it to the boiling potato. Once the potato is cooked, attack the soup with an immersion blender or pour it into the blender. I like mine a little chunky still, not too pureed. Serve with some bacon and scallions on top. Tastes best with some toasted baguette or sourdough bread...

Watercress soup

This would be my mom's recipe. I may as well rename this blog to something like "things that other people cook and Alex takes pictures of". Or, "things that Ed cooks" might be more appropriate. Although he didn't cook this soup, but he did cook the steak that followed...

Anyway, I'd never thought of putting watercress in a soup, but the cream mellows any bitterness, plus she sauteed the watercress first. Approximately:

3-4C chicken stock (homemade is best)
2-3C watercress
1/4C cream
1 onion
1 potato
Cheese for grating on top
flour and butter for a roux

For the stock, we boiled a chicken leg with a bay leaf, some mustard seeds, cumin seeds, a carrot (broken into pieces) and an onion (chopped into pieces) for about an hour. Then we drained it and let it cool enough to skim off some of the fat.

I didn't observe the making of the roux, but the way I would do it is to saute the onion first in some butter, then add another tablespoon or two of butter once its sweated, then add an equal amount of flour, cook it for a while, then add some of the chicken stock, and then add the whole mess back to the pot with the chicken stock. The potato should be already in the soup boiling away - cut it into little pieces to make it cook faster. Then saute the watercress in the same pan, add it to the soup, and then blend the soup. Add the cream, a little bit at a time until it looks properly creamy. Then serve it, we had some grated pecorino on top, and it was good.

French onion soup

Ed made French onion soup the other day. Why do I feel like hes doing all the cooking recently? Or at least all the cooking that isn't an uninspired pile o' rice and beans... It was fairly simple, but definitely delicious.

The broth was dashi, which is some sort of dried tuna flakes that get used in Japanese cooking to make broths. It worked well enough, I mean, it was salty and tasty and liquid, although I'm sure a homemade chicken stock would have been better. The only thing in the soup were onions, and then there were croutons on top of that, with lots of cheddar cheese sprinkled on top. Yes, gruyere would have been more appropriate, but we used what we had.

Cook the onions (1-2 per bowl of soup, cut into long-ish slices) in butter in a pan until they're just starting to caramelize, lightly brown (10 minutes or so). Add them to your bowl of home made chicken broth. Turn the oven on to broil. Put the croutons on top of the soup, and sprinkle a hefty layer of grated cheese on top. Put the bowl under the broiler until the cheese is all melted. Be careful when you take it out, that lil' sucker is gonna be hot.

Easy, and delicious. We're out of cheese now or I'd do it again for dinner.

Squash soup

Its squash soup season again! My favorite time of year. This was a particularly good soup, if I can say so myself, although it was a bit on the thick side. Which is fixable, but I'm lazy some days. This gets a good Ed-rating, he liked it too. Its especially good with some fresh bread to dip into it... just a suggestion...

Squash soup

~4C chicken stock
1 parmesan rind
1 bay leaf
half a cinnamon stick
1 clove
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
1 small apple (or half a regular sized one)
1 butternut squash
2 tbs olive oil

Chop the onion in half, use half in the soup and caramelize the other half for putting on top. Heat some olive oil in a pot, sweat the onion, add the garlic, its all going to get blended so nothing needs to get too finely chopped. Add the chicken stock, bay leaf, parmesan rind, clove, and cinnamon. You can skip all the spices if you want, but it won't be as good. Peel and chop the squash and add it to the pot. You could roast it first, Ed suggested that, but it was an extra step I didn't want to do. Peel and chop the apple. Boil everything until the squash is super soft. Take out the parmesan rind, cinnamon, clove, and bay leaf (have fun finding them...). Using a stick blender, or a big blender, and blend it all up. Serve with some caramelized onions on top.

Everything soup

Ed made a soup, and it was delicious, so I took pictures. As with most Ed-recipes, who knows what the recipe actually is. Hopefully I'll be able to get you close, though. Basically, we fried a bunch of things, and then added them to the hot soup of noodles and dashi and daikon. It might not sound glamorous, but it was tasty, and relatively cheap as far as our fancy meals go.

The fried things on top were tofu, spicy red peppers (the long skinny kind, but not the thai red peppers, these were pretty smooth-skinned), and oyster mushrooms. We put them in a pretty dish, which precipitated me taking pictures and putting this on a blog. The soup broth was entirely dashi, which is little pellets of tuna, with some julianed daikon, a little kale, and egg noodles. We happen to have dashi because Ed discovered that you can get a giant box of it at the super88, and it goes really well as a broth for cold soba noodles. I'll do my best with a recipe...

Asian-flavored everything soup
Makes approximately 4 servings

1 bunch of fresh egg noodles (about half a pound to a pound? the measurement doesn't matter too much)
3/4 daikon root, julianned
4-6C water
3 tbs of dashi (look at the instructions on the package)
~1C kale, chopped finely
~9oz firm tofu
~2C cooking oil
2 long skinny smooth-skinned red peppers, sliced crosswise into little pieces
~4C oyster mushrooms, chopped coarsely
~4 tbs butter
Salt

First, you need to press the tofu. If it comes in a block, the way ours does, slice it into thirds, and place it on a dish towel. Fold the dish towel over the top of the tofu and put a cutting board or something else thats big and flat on top. Then add a couple cookbooks, maybe 15 pounds worth of weight, and let it sit for 20-30 minutes.

Start cooking your mushrooms, because they take a while. Salt them liberally, and add 2-3 tbs of butter to a pan. Cook the mushrooms on medium high for about 20 minutes, adding butter as needed, until they're nice and crispy. Don't be afraid of the salt, a lot of it gets used to draw the water out of the mushrooms.

Meanwhile, put about an inch of oil into a wok or other big pot. Get the oil hot by putting it on high heat, and before it starts smoking, turn it down. Add the pepper slices, and toss them around just until they're cooked - you don't want them to turn brown. Take them out of the oil and set them on a paper-towel-covered plate to drain. Don't skip this step, the deep-fried peppers are really awesome. It kind of takes away some of the heat so you can actually taste pepper-ness. Its good. I was able to taste the peppers once they were cooked without running to the fridge for a glass of cream.

Take the books off the tofu, and slice it into bite-sized pieces. Add the tofu to the oil, turning up the heat as you add the tofu, and then turning it down a little once its back up to heat. You sort of have to just use your intuition on this one. Stir around the tofu once or twice so it doesn't stick, and take it out when its golden brown and crispy looking. Add it to the paper-towel-covered-plate.

Your mushrooms will be close to done by now, so set a pot of water on to boil, with the dashi and the daikon and kale. Once the water is boiling, these things are mostly done, so you can add the noodles, which cook really quickly since they're fresh. Taste them after a minute, you want to take the soup off the heat while the noodles are still pretty chewy, so that they don't turn to mush.

Serve the soup in a bowl, with the crunchy things sprinkled on top. Enjoy!