A day like this:
calls for this:
— home-made Manhattan clam chowdah! (also known as chowder, for those not from New England)
Now it’s time to go shovel…
Tag Archives: cooking
Feeling a little Connecticut today
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Tagged chowdah, cooking, Manhatten clam chowder, snow storm, soup
The secret’s in the sauce
Inspired by Molly Katzen’s Autumn Vegetable Soup (Still Life with Menu, p. 49), today I made Whatever the Heck You Have on Hand Soup.
I had a quart bag each of chopped turnips, white sweet potatoes, and acorn squash in my freezer. I had some carrots, celery, tomatoes, and red bell peppers left over from holiday party crudite platters. I had a bit of frozen chopped onion and some frozen chopped Red Russian kale.
I chopped up the leftover crudite, then sautéed the carrot, onion, and celery in canola oil until it began to smell yummy. Then I dumped in the turnips, sweet potatoes, and squash, added 3 cups water and one Garden Veggie boullion cube, and cooked it over medium heat until the turnips were soft. I stirred in everything else, plus three cloves minced garlic, salt, pepper, a little soy sauce, a bay leaf, and a dash each of basil, oregano (in place of marjoram), cayenne, curry powder, and Mrs. Dash. I turned it down to simmer and let it fill the house with savory goodness.
Despite the hearty aroma, the broth tasted a little anemic. I rummaged through the fridge and found a small amount of leftover homemade spaghetti sauce. That did the trick: I stirred it in, and the soup went from mezza mezza to bravissimo!
Now to see if the kids will eat it.
(Supper update: The kids liked the flavor but found the texture of the veggies a bit off-putting. A few minutes with the potato masher sufficiently broke down the offending chunks to please the diners’ sensitive palates.)
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Tagged cooking, kale, soup, spaghetti sauce, squash, sweet potatoes, turnips, veggies
The sesame made me do it
It happened again.
Inspired by this recipe at cozywalls, I made sesame sauce to toss with spaghetti squash for lunch and ended up eating the entire squash. At least yesterday it was squash; last time it was a whole package of buckwheat udon.
I made a good faith effort: I divided it into two generous portions, put one in a plastic container in the fridge and the other on my plate. I sat down to eat, and the flavor was fantastic! The texture of the spaghetti squash was unusual, and the way it interacted with the texture of the sesame made me roll my eyes. I’ll just have another taste, I told myself. There’s still plenty for tomorrow, I reasoned. And before long, the plastic container was empty.
I wish I could say, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” but I can and do believe it. It was that yummy.
Thanks to the lower density (and lower caloric content) of the spaghetti squash, I didn’t feel grotesquely bloated as I did after I finished off the sesame-coated udon a couple weeks ago. I don’t think one can actually feel virtuous about having single-handedly eaten an entire squash in one sitting, but it could have been worse. (Is that rationalizing?)
I can’t seem to lay off the sauce – I store plain noodles in the refrigerator all the time without the least temptation to pull them out and eat them. Amy at cozywalls says the stuff tastes even better if left to sit overnight, but I’m beginning to doubt that I will ever find out for myself.
So here is the plan from now on: I will only make half as much sesame sauce, and toss it with just half of the noodles (or medium du jour). If this strategy doesn’t work, I may need an intervention.
And here, so you can develop your own sauce habit, is the recipe:
Quick and Addictive Sesame Sauce
2 tbsp. sesame tahini
2 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
1 tsp. hot sesame oil
1 tsp. minced garlic
sesame seeds for garnish (toasted or not — your preference)
Stir together first four ingredients and toss with cooked noodles, spaghetti squash, cucumbers, broccoli, snow peas, bean sprouts, shredded cabbage, or anything else that sounds good. Sprinkle with sesame seeds. (Makes enough sauce for 8 oz. package of noodles.)
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Tagged cooking, eating, lunch, noodles, spaghetti squash, tahini, the sauce, udon
Avocado aficianado
I have become the sort of person who always has at least one avocado in the house. In fact, when I eat my last avocado, I feel a little panicky: what if I want some avocado before I have a chance to stop at the store?
Growing up, I don’t think I even knew what an avocado was. For all I know, they didn’t carry them in the grocery stores where I lived. My first true experience with avocados happened while visiting friends in Santa Fe. We went to a local restaurant where they made guacamole fresh, at your table, while you watched. It was amazingly delicious, and I was in love.
I started looking for avocados in my local grocery, buying them whenever I found them and making my own guacamole. Then another friend, who had lived in Santa Fe for several years, introduced me to sliced avocado on a sandwich. She puts turkey, a slice of bacon, Monterey Jack cheese, and sliced avocado on toasted wheat bread spread with homemade pesto mayonnaise. It’s incredible! Now I had something else to make with avocados!
Now I put avocado in my Southwest chicken soup; I put it on tacos and burritos; I eat avocado wedges with chicken salad, and sometimes I just scoop it out of the shell with a spoon and eat it plain. I recently found a recipe for tuna salad with avocado, which I will be making for lunch the next time I eat at home.
What’s your favorite avocado recipe?
(The image above is from http://whatscookingamerica.net/avacado.htm, which has some great information about choosing and using avocados.)
Dough!
(I’ll be off the grid for a week, so the Z to A Even Day Blog Challenge is on hold until I get back.)
(image from Amazon.com)
At the library last week, I saw a new cookbook that I must have: The Cookie Dough Lover’s Cookbook, by food blogger Lindsay Landis. It’s chock-full of recipes featuring egg-free cookie dough made to be eaten raw. I knew this book was for me when I read the following:
This book is dedicated to anyone who’s ever been caught with a finger in the mixing bowl.
When I was growing up, we always doubled any cookie dough recipe we made because otherwise there would be no cookies. We all ate the cookie dough, raw eggs notwithstanding, and with five people dipping into the mixing bowl, a single batch of dough wouldn’t yield much more than one pan of cookies.
From the moment I walked in the house with this book, my daughter badgered me to make things from it. The first night, she insisted on making Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Pudding. Pudding made from scratch involves a lot of time standing at the stove, stirring, which explains why instant pudding is so popular. She gamely hung in there, declining my offers to relieve her. The pudding didn’t cool in time to eat that night, but we had a festive dessert after dinner the next evening.
We next made a batch of classic Chocolate Chip Dough. It was delicious! We didn’t feel so great after snarfing down the entire batch, however, and agreed in future to divide the dough and set a portion of it aside before we start eating. That strategy worked well with the Peanut Butter Dough we made next, which we modified by using half whole wheat flour and adding chocolate chips.
Aside from the delicious doughs themselves, the cookbook offers recipes in which dough plays a decadent part: truffles, fudge, brownies, pie, cheesecake, frozen treats, granola bars, pancakes, fritters, and more. The directions are easy to follow and the photography is truly drool-worthy.
(I apologize for not having any pictures, but we ate everything before I thought about this blog post. The truth is, I find it hard to think about anything at all when faced with a bowlful of cookie dough.)
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Tagged baking, children, chocolate chips, cookbooks, cookie dough, cooking, desserts, Lindsay Landis, The Cookie Dough Lover's Cookbook
T is for Tea (of course!)
Ah, tea! Hearty Assam, smooth Darjeeling, delicate green, smoky Oolong. Blended, flavored, fermented to all degrees. With honey, milk, sugar, butter, lemon, spices. By the pot, by the cup, by the mug. Loose-leaf, bagged, or tied into flowers. In the morning, at noon, mid-afternoon, or after dinner.
I like both tea (made with the dried leaves of Camellia sinensis) and tisane (infusions that don’t include Camellia sinensis). Of the former, I especially enjoy English Breakfast, jasmine, Tazo’s Zen. Of the latter, I’m partial to rooibos, my own infusion of fresh lemon basil, and a couple of medicinal combinations for various purposes.
Tea (and tisane) has gained enough of a foothold in this country that it’s fairly widely available in some form or another. You can’t always get it hot; you don’t always have much selection; you seldom get it with milk, but you can find it. That makes me ridiculously happy. (Maybe it helps explain why I was so delirious with joy just being in the UK.)
Several years ago, I had a group of friends who held old-fashioned tea parties. Some collected teacups, teapots, and other paraphernalia. Some assembled recipes and tried out menus and techniques. Some scoured tag sales for hats and gloves, table linens, and parasols. We staged elaborate gatherings, complete with poetry readings and croquet, depending on the season. It was glorious fun.
I no longer live near these friends, nor do I have the time or the energy for such theatrics, but I still find both comfort and sustenance in a nice hot cuppa, no matter what the time of day.
Madwoman, part 2
As a follow-up to my Madwoman in the Kitchen post, I made waffles this morning. Here’s how I did it and how it turned out:
Just before going to bed last night, I mixed the following together in a my big, yellow Pyrex bowl:
- 2 cups warm water
- 1 tbsp yeast
- 4-1/3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tbsp kosher salt
I put a dinner plate over the bowl and left it on the counter overnight. When I got up this morning, I added the following:
- 1 cup milk, warmed
- 1/2 cup melted butter
- 1 tsp sugar
- 2 eggs, slightly beaten
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
I poured a scant cup onto the heated waffle iron, shut the lid, and let it cook. It sizzled as the batter spread in the iron, and a little bit of batter drizzled out the corners (I’ve a square waffle iron). The waffles turned out crispy and golden, and I didn’t even have to spritz the iron with oil (all that butter in the batter).
Here’s the post-mortem:
This amount of batter made six 10 x 10 inch waffles, which was more than we could eat. I know that sounds impossible, since 6-foot-tall teenage boy with two hollow legs eats at my table, but the waffles are so rich (all that butter) that even he couldn’t eat more than one whole waffle at a single sitting. Unless I’m feeding more people, next time I’ll cut it in half and use the remaining proofed dough for bread or something.
The waffles were so buttery tasting (all that butter!) that even my butter-freak daughter (who has been known to eat butter…plain) ate them straight up. I drizzled a little real maple syrup on mine; it was divine!
I’d say this was a success; it wasn’t difficult and both kids seemed to really like the results. (As you can see, my food photography skills haven’t improved, but maybe that comes of using inferior equipment — I used an old I-Phone for ease of photo transfer.) I’ll throw the leftovers in the freezer for quick toaster waffles on school mornings.
Madwoman in the kitchen
If I ever started a blog about cooking, I would name it the same as this post. I like to cook and bake, and do both quite a lot. Unfortunately for my family, I’m very open to new things and willing to experiment with weird ingredients and techniques. To make matters more interesting, I almost never follow a recipe exactly.
As an over-educated liberal arts major with anarchistic tendencies, I see recipes as texts to be interpreted rather than prescriptions to be followed. This may be an admirable approach for cultural analysis, but it has serious drawbacks as a culinary philosophy. I do follow recommended measurements with baked goods, as the chemistry of baking allows a smaller margin of error than other forms of cooking, but most recipes serve me more as inspirational guidelines than as instructions.
Finding just such inspiration in a post by my dear friend Murphala at FlourWaterYeast&Salt, yesterday I made bread dough. From scratch. Yup. And I’m here to tell you it worked and was blissfully easy.
I cut the recipe she gave down to one-third, threw all the stuff in a bowl, covered it with a damp dish towel, and started making dinner. Things got busy after we finished eating – in addition to the usual chores and homework, we had to take down the tree (it was starting to get a little crispy) – and I forgot all about the dough until just before bed. I put a plate on top of the bowl and stuck it in the fridge.
Because of weather developments, we got an automated call from the school district at 5:45 informing us there would be a one hour delay. (I prefer the old method – just turn on the TV at my usual waking time – but I’m sure there are parents out there who really appreciated knowing about the delay at that hour.) I lay there trying to go back to sleep, and after a long while it occurred to me that I had both extra time and a bowl full of bread dough.
I rolled out of bed, turned on the oven to preheat, and pulled out my trusty Betty Crocker Cookbook. The cinnamon roll recipe gave me a general idea of how to proceed, and I was off. I dumped all the dough onto my pastry board and worked enough flour into it to keep it from sticking too badly. It was still pretty wet, so I flattened it by hand into a large rectangle rather than rolling it.
I slathered it with this too-soft buttery spread my sister left here at New Year’s, then sprinkled it with sugar and cinnamon. Then I rolled it up, starting from the long side, cut it into nine pieces, and placed them in a greased 9 x 9 pan.
I didn’t really have time to let it rise for 40 minutes and then bake for 30 minutes – I only had 60 extra minutes here, people! – so I reasoned that the dough, which was still quite cold, would rise okay in the oven. I turned the heat down from 375 F to 350 F until I saw it had doubled, at which point I turned it back up. It baked for a total of 45 minutes, until the tops split open and no longer looked wet inside.
For glaze, I took a little less than a cup of powdered sugar (all that was left in the box) and added enough sour cream to get the consistency I wanted. I spooned this over the hot rolls; it sizzled most delightfully when it touched the still-hot sides of the pan. By this point, the entire house smelled of warm cinnamon and the whole family was gathered in the kitchen, tongues lolling out of their mouths.
Here’s the post-mortem:
- Because this was bread dough and not sweet roll dough, I should have used more cinnamon and a bit more sugar. Next time I will press it a little wider and thinner so the cinnamon is distributed more evenly when it’s rolled.
- My theory about the cold dough rising in the oven seemed to work out okay. The dough was also very wet, which helped the end result not be too dry and bread-like. It also developed a slight tang overnight, but not so much that it conflicted with the cinnamon.
- Next time I’ll only use half the dough from a batch this size. (That would also help with the cinnamon/sugar distribution.) I knew from the proportions in the cinnamon roll recipe that I should only use half, but when I grabbed the dough to divide it, the whole batch seemed to want to come out of the bowl at once. (It’s pretty sad when you can’t match wits with a glob of wet dough.)
So that’s what happened. You can see from the picture that I’m not a very good food photographer, but the result of this spontaneous experiment was edible and quite tasty, if not exactly what everyone had in mind.
I’ve been told I can try again, which is the greatest affirmation this madwoman can hope for.
Fantastic for lunch
Today I had the simplest, most deliciousest lunch ever. (Yes, I just coined a new word and used it incorrectly. Sue me.)
I started with half a chicken breast. Mine was from a local farm that raises the most delectable free-range chickens — I’m a firm believer that if you’re going to eat meat, you have a responsibility to make sure that the critters you eat had good lives before they found their way to your table.
I put the chicken breast in my small frying pan, covered it, and cooked it on medium heat until I could hear it sizzle. At that point, I raised the lid and drizzled a couple tablespoons of chicken broth over it. I did that again once or twice, then turned the breast and repeated on the other side. I removed the chicken to a plate, leaving the pan with a lovely layer of carmelized chicken juices.
I deglazed the pan with 1/2 cup chicken broth, then tossed in a fist-sized snowball of frozen chopped spinach. (I roughly estimate this was about 3/4 cup.) I put the lid back on for a bit; when I looked again, the spinach had defrosted.
I stirred in 1 teaspoon minced garlic (I use garlic by the cupful, so I buy it pre-minced in really big jars) and the leftover brown rice from yesterday’s lunch (again, I estimate it was about 3/4 cup). I turned off the heat while I cut up the chicken, and the mixture was warmed through by the time I plated it with the chicken. The flavor was indescribably fantastic! (I realize “fantastic” is a description of sorts, but I’m thinking of it more as a noun, as in “I had fantastic for lunch today.”)
If you’ve already had lunch today, be sure to put fantastic on your menu for tomorrow!
Oscar night dinner: Spaghetti Western Mac
Seeing as tonight is the Oscars, I decided to make a movie tribute version of a one-pot family favorite, Western Mac. I got the original recipe in college from the back of a box of macaroni and cheese. I have included both the movie tribute version and the original for your cooking enjoyment.
Spaghetti Western Mac
1/2 lb. Italian sausage
2 boxes mac and cheese (Annie’s Shells & White Cheddar is our favorite)
2-3 tbsp. plain yogurt or sour cream
1 c. spaghetti sauce (more or less to taste)
Brown sausage in 4 qt. pot; set aside in a bowl lined with a paper towel (to absorb excess grease). Fill pot with water and bring to boil; add pasta from box and cook for 8 minutes. Drain pasta and return to pot. Add yogurt/sour cream and stir until pasta is coated; add powdered cheese from package and stir until mixed. Stir in Italian sausage and spaghetti sauce until well mixed, and presto! One-pot Spaghetti Western Mac!
Original Western Mac
1/2 lb hamburger
1 small onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
1 box Kraft Macaroni and Cheese
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup canned or frozen corn
1 small (6 oz.) can tomato paste
salt and pepper to taste
Brown hamburger in 2 qt. saucepan; add onion and green pepper and saute until onions are soft. Set aside in a bowl lined with a paper towel (to absorb excess grease). Fill pot with water and prepare macaroni and cheese according to package directions. (If using frozen corn, cook it by placing it in the colander and draining the pasta over it.) Stir in corn and meat mixture; add tomato paste and stir until mixed. Season to taste.
The Daily Compost 