Cooking Marathon Mondays

So this semester I have Mondays off (yay!), so I try to plan my menu in such a way that I can do my more labor intensive cooking on Monday, before my school week starts. I'm at the beginning of a new menu cycle, and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen today, absorbed in preparing broccoli-potato soup and sausage cassoulet. I had to hang around the apartment anyway, because the annual termite inspection guy was going to show up. He surveyed my (luckily clean and tidy) apartment for all of two minutes with a flashlight. No termites. That's heartening news of course, but as I am going to be moving soon, I wasn't overly concerned with the termite population. As to the moving soon, more about that in a future post.

First I need to rate the recipes from my last menu.

Miso Shrimp and Rice:

This was something I threw together with things I had on hand, and it was OK, but doesn't merit a recipe.

Convenience: 5

Deliciousness: 3

Value: 4

Left-over worthiness: 4

Good for you-ness: 4

Roasted Potatoes in Romesco Sauce:

I adapted this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, and I must admit I was a bit in over my head here. The Romesco sauce was complicated but ultimately amazing; the potatoes a hot mess. Prepared properly, the deliciousness quotient would certainly be more on this one.

Convenience: 2

Deliciousness: 3.5

Value: 3

Left-over worthiness: 3

Good for you-ness: 2

Pork Carnitas Tacos:

Convenience: 2

Deliciousness: 5

Value: 3

Left-over worthiness: 4

Good for you-ness: 2

Spinach and Mushroom Frittata:

Convenience: 5

Deliciousness: 4

Value: 4

Left-over worthiness: 4

Good for you-ness: 3

Baked Polenta with Mushrooms:

Convenience: 4

Deliciousness: 4

Value: 5

Left-over worthiness: 5

Good for you-ness: 3

Skillet Black Beans and Potatoes:

Now, I will probably post the recipe for this eventually, because the first time I made it I was so pleased with the results. It was one of those meals that I was sad about when there wasn't any left. This time around I made it with presoaked as opposed to canned black beans, and I really didn't prepare the beans that well. The result was disappointing. However, I know the potential is there.

Convenience: 3.5

Deliciousness: 4

Value: 5

Left-over worthiness: 4

Good for you-ness: 5

Patchwork Pasta (Penne with Chicken and Spinach):

This reheats pretty well; the only negative is the spinach--pleasantly wilted on the first go--is listless and sad on subsequent re-heatings. I added a little bit of fresh spinach to my leftovers to brighten it a bit.

Convenience: 4

Deliciousness: 5

Value: 4

Left-over worthiness: 4

Good for you-ness: 4

Here's my menu for the next two weeks. I am incorporating made-from-scratch recipes with frozen leftovers, in an effort to clean out my freezer as much as possible pre-moving day:

Broccoli-Potato Soup x 4

Sausage Cassoulet x 4

Achiote Chicken and Rice (made with frozen achiote paste from Puerco Pibil) x 4

Ethiopian-style Yellow Split Peas (repurposing frozen Yellow Split Pea and Sweet Potato Soup) x 2

Broccoli and Sausage Strata x 4

Onion Galette x 4

Cheesy Polenta with Roasted Root Vegetables x 4

Black Bean and Sweet Potato Enchiladas (premade, frozen) x 2

As I mentioned above, my day was mostly taken up in the preparation of two rather labor intensive but satisfying culinary endeavors: Broccoli-Potato Soup and Sausage Cassoulet. Here are recipes for both.

This soup is at once light and healthy as well as pleasingly rich and creamy, thanks to pureeing, without the addition of any milk or cream. It's also quite easy to prepare, provided you have a food processor or immersion blender. It can be made vegetarian or vegan by subbing vegetable broth for the chicken broth, olive oil for the butter, and omitting the Parmesan cheese. A tasty vegan alternative to the cheese might be a topping of crushed toasted almonds or some kind of nut cheese.

Broccoli-Potato Soup

2 cups broccoli stems, peeled and diced into ½ inch chunks

2 cups red potato, peeled and diced into ½ inch chunks

2 Tbsps butter

1 onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 cups chicken broth

3 cups water

¼ cup almonds, toasted and ground in a food processor or spice grinder

2 cups broccoli florets, finely chopped

½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, divided in half

Salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a large pot and sauté the garlic and onion about five minutes. Add the potatoes, broccoli stems, chicken broth, water, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat; simmer about ten minutes, or until the broccoli and potatoes are “crisp tender”; that is, tender but not mushy. Using an immersion blender, or in batches in a food processor, puree the soup to your preferred thickness. Stir in the broccoli florets, almonds, and half of the Parmesan cheese and simmer for five more minutes. Serve garnished with remaining Parmesan. Four servings.

If you're unfamiliar with cassoulet, it's kind of a cross between a stew and a casserole. It's a hearty French peasant dish made with white beans and some kind of fatty meat (often a combination of duck and sausage). I adapted this recipe from Real Simple. This humble version, which takes advantage of inexpensive winter root vegetables, carrot and parsnips, is an easier take on the more complicated all-day-long version. Still, it's quite satisfying. It's very flavorful, perfect for a cold winter's day, and preparing it will make you feel like Julia Child.

Sausage Cassoulet

2 large sausage links, casings removed (I used Polish, but Italian would be fine, too)

3 cups prepared white beans, drained (about 1 and 1/2 cans)

2 medium carrots, peeled and diced

2 medium parsnips, peeled and diced

1 red onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup chicken broth

1/2 cup crushed tomato

1 tsp dried thyme

Dash of Cayenne pepper

Salt and black pepper to taste

1 cup buttered breadcrumbs (I used sourdough, which I recommend)

In a Dutch oven or lidded, range-top safe casserole dish, brown the sausage over medium heat, breaking it up with a spoon. When the sausage is browned, drain off excess fat. Add all remaining ingredients except breadcrumbs to the pot. Stir well to combine. If needed, add more chicken stock and/or tomato to the pot to keep the vegetables moist. Simmer covered until the carrots and parsnips are tender, at least 30 minutes. While the pot is simmering, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. When the vegetables are tender, top with the butter breadcrumbs and bake uncovered for 10-15 minutes, until the breadcrumbs are toasted. 4 servings.

As Julia Child would say, bon appetit!

A Pasta For All Seasons

Tuesday is my long day on campus this semester, and this time of year it's already dark by the time I get out of class, and I'm more than ready for dinner. Riding my bike home in the dark and the cold makes me crave comfort food. Thus, the perfect meal for my Tuesday is something that will come together quickly and easily and appeal to my comfort-food criteria. A simple pasta dish is often the answer.

The great thing about pasta is that it is incredibly versatile. You don't always have to go traditional; it's an ideal canvas for experimenting with unlikely combinations of flavors, or bringing together that random assortment of things left in the fridge toward the end of grocery cycle. The meal I made tonight is just one of those things I threw together with some pantry staples and odds and ends I happened to have on hand. Because I suppose it ought to have a name, I call it patchwork pasta. Though it's not traditional at all, the flavors echo traditional Italian, and it's hearty and familiar enough to fit the comfort food bill. Yet, it's fairly light and relatively healthy. It tastes fresh and light in a way that suggests summer, but because it's made from items that are available year round, it's suitable for any time of the year.

The tangy, salty, and spicy and subtly sweet flavors of this sauce would pair equally well with shrimp or a firm-fleshed fish like tuna. The sauce is substantial enough and the flavor bold enough to hold its own without meat; to make this vegan, omit the butter and parmesan and replace the meat with a can of garbanzo or white beans, or just let the flavors do their thing.

Patchwork Pasta

1/2 pound penne pasta (1/2 a package)

1 large boneless skinless chicken breast, cut into ½ inch cubes

3 oz baby spinach, sliced (baby spinach often comes in 6 oz bags; use half a bag)

½ cup tomato paste

2 Tbsps almonds, chopped

4 garlic cloves, minced

10 green olives, sliced

1/2 cup white wine

Juice of 1/2 a lemon

1 Tbsp butter

1 Tbsp olive oil

2 tsps – 1 Tbsp Crushed red pepper

Coarse salt to taste

Fresh grated Parmesan to garnish

Bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil. Add pasta and cook until just al dente. Drain and rinse with cold water and set aside. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a large skillet over medium high heat, and add the olive oil. Add the chicken and allow to brown on all sides. Add the almonds while chicken is browning. Remove chicken and almonds from the skillet and set aside. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper to the skillet and cook until garlic starts to turn golden. Pour in the wine and lemon juice, followed by the tomato paste and salt. Stir well to combine. When it starts to bubble, add the olives and spinach to the pan. Once the spinach cooks down a bit, return the chicken to the pan and toss. Add the pasta to the skillet and toss until it is well coated with the sauce and heated through. Serve topped with a generous sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. Four servings

Still Divorced, Still Sexy

Happy New Year! As you may have noticed, I have not updated this blog in quite some time. The past few months have been especially hectic for the Sexy Divorcee, and life intervened, as it sometimes does. In a future post, I may go into that, but we'll see. The important thing for me vis-a-vis this blog is just to get posting again. I will probably be blogging less often, but as I get readjusted to life back in my own little apartment I do want to get back into the habit of posting not only recipes but also my meal plans and shopping lists. I went grocery shopping today--when I got home yesterday there were only condiments, a partial tub of light cream cheese, and (THANK GOD!!) enough coffee beans for my morning French press--so I will update you with shopping list and meal plan probably this weekend. So here's a quick post for the new year.

One of my dearest friends ever, who blogs at Still Life and who is way more motivated than me and a more ambitious cook than I am, sent me a little chapbook-style cookbook as a "Valentine's" present (I think it came in March or maybe April) that she had compiled of some of her favorite recipes, some of which were totally original. There are some wonderful things in this book, and I love it a lot. It's one of the nicest presents I think I've ever gotten. But...I really haven't made very many of the recipes in it. But I was looking at her recipe for Aubergine-Chickpea ragout, and thought, hm. That's the perfect thing to get me back on track with healthy cooking and eating after the holidays. Of course, being me, I tweaked it. In fact, it bears very little resemblance to the original, except for the presence of chickpeas and tomato. It doesn't even have the eggplant...er, aubergine. Still, I was pretty happy with the result, which kind of has a North African vibe (in my imagination, anyway), and I still must credit my friend for being the inspiration.

This recipe is totally vegan, but I think it would probably be awesome with some chunks of lamb in it, or as an accompaniment to grilled chicken or lamb.

Cauliflower-Chickpea Ragout

½ head of cauliflower, cut into bite-sized chunks

1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 large carrot, diced

1 small red onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup crushed tomato (from can…freeze the leftovers)

2 whole cloves

¼ tsp each ground (adjust blend to taste):

cinnamon

paprika

cumin

coriander

cardamom

zest of 1 lemon + 1 tbsp lemon juice

salt to taste

In a good-sized pan, heat a swirl of olive oil over medium heat. When it shimmers, add garlic. Saute, stirring constantly, for about 30 seconds and then add onion. When the onion begins to soften, add the spice mixture and stir into the onion. Add half the tomato and the carrot and cauliflower. Stir until the vegetables are well coated with the tomato. Add the remaining tomato (and a little water if necessary), lemon juice, and salt and cook over low heat, covered, for 20 minutes or until vegetables are desired tenderness. When the vegetables are cooked, add the lemon zest and chickpeas and cook until warmed through. Serve over rice. 4 servings.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a nice holiday. Let's hope we're all still here a year from now, and that the world does not end, Mayan calendar or no Mayan calendar.

Catching Up

Last week was a heavy week in grad school. Tons of student conferences, a twenty-page reading journal I neglected to attend to until the week before it was due, hundreds of pages of reading, and so on. Not much time left over for blogging. Now conferences are over and the journal is off my desk...just in time for me to begin grading 50 papers! It's a good think I got some cooking in on Sunday so I have some things to eat.

For lunch I made chana masala, using a recipe modified from Smitten Kitchen. The internets tell me that "chana" is Hindi for chickpea, while masala just refers to a spice mixture. According to wikipedia, chana masala is popular in the Indian states of Punjab and Gujarat, and is typically a "dry"curry. I don't know how accurate that is, but this is definitely a saucy version, so if you are from India or know a lot about Indian food, this recipe might not produce what you think of when you think of chana masala. Deb of SK writes that her recipe is itself a modification of another she got somewhere else, which may explain why something about this recipe wasn't exactly what I expected. It still turned out fine...quite tasty, in fact. But it's lacking something that I expect from an Indian dish...maybe a certain spice, or maybe the proportions are off, or something, but I may tinker with it. Like Deb, I did not have amchur powder (dried mango), which imparts sourness, so in addition to the lemon juice I splashed in a little white vinegar.

2 onions, minced

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 tsps fresh ginger, peeled and grated

1 serrano pepper, minced

1 Tbsp ground coriander

1 Tbsp amchur powder (or, an equal amount of extra lemon juice or white vinegar)

2 tsps ground cumin

2 tsps paprika

1 tsp turmeric

1 tsp garam masala

1/4 tsp cayenne

2 15-oz cans chickpeas, or 4 cups cooked (if starting with dry)

2 cups finely diced tomatoes, or 2 cups canned crushed tomatoes + juice (I used canned; if you can only find 30-oz cans measure out what you need and freeze the rest)

Juice of 1 lemon

1/2 cup water

salt to taste

Heat about a tablespoon of vegetable oil in a large pot. Add the onions, garlic, ginger, and serrano and cook until the onion is soft and translucent. Add the dry spices except salt (I measure them out into a little dish beforehand so I can just throw them all in at once) and cook for a few minutes. Add the tomatoes and stir well, making sure to scrape up any bits cooked to the bottom of the pan. Add the chickpeas and water and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. If it seems dry, add a little more water, a tablespoon at a time. Stir in the salt, lemon juice, and vinegar if using. I poured this over cooked rice and ate it with a little plain yogurt on top. You could also have it with an Indian-style bread. Wikipedia also tells me that in Punjab and Pakistan, the dish is often served with a puffy bread called bhatoora (looks kind of like a sopapilla) and is eaten for breakfast. This will yield four to six servings. Vegan! Unless you add yogurt, like I did.

Fast-forward several hours...

For dinner I made what the One Pot Cookbook I bought at a yard sale calls "Asian pork." This seemed kind of...general to me, so I retitled it sweet and sour pork, which may or may not be what it is, but at least it's a little less geographically and racially ambiguous. I was a little skeptical about making this, because the recipes I have made out of this book have been sort of hit and miss (probably why it ended up in the yard sale pile). Some of the things I have made out of it turned out great/just like the picture; other recipes have turned out to have wildly inaccurate measurements and cooking times. In this case, however, it turned out kind of awesome. It did taste pretty much like the sweet and sour pork I have eaten in Chinese restaurants before. The sauce is really good, not overwhelmingly sweet or sour, and not greasy. Yummy.

1 lb boneless pork (I used the remainder of the pork butt I bought for puerco pibil; carefully trimming as much fat as possible off. It worked pretty well), cut into 1" cubes

1 Tbsp flour

1 onion, sliced into thin wedges (like an apple for a pie)

3 garlic cloves, chopped

1-inch chunk of ginger, peeled and grated

1 Tbsp tomato paste

1 1/4 cups chicken stock

1 cup pineapple chunks with juice (half a 15-oz can)

1 Tbsp soy sauce

3 celery ribs, diagonally sliced

1 bell pepper, chopped

1 Tbsp vinegar (I used white, but sherry or red-wine vinegar would do)

sliced green onions for garnish

Toss the pork chunks in the flour until well coated. Mix together the chicken stock, the tomato paste, and the pineapple juice (reserving the pineapple until later) until well-combined, and keep it at hand. Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy pot. Add the onion, garlic, and ginger and cook over medium heat, stirring often, until the onions soften. Add the pork and cook, stirring constantly, until it is browned on all sides. You may need to add the pork in batches; I found that the pieces wanted to stick together in a big clump when I put them in, which made separating and cooking them evenly a bit tricky. Remove from the heat (I don't know why, but that's what the book says). Pour the chicken-stock mixture gradually into the pan while stirring. Add the soy sauce and return to the heat. Continue stirring and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for about an hour. At about forty-five minutes in, add the bell pepper and celery for the last fifteen minutes of cooking. Stir in the pineapple and vinegar and serve garnished with sliced green onions and a side of white rice. Makes about four servings.

Friday Nuttiness

I don't know about you, but I'm glad it's Friday.

I'm not going to get all fancy with this post, which is appropriate, because I didn't get all fancy with dinner, either. Sometimes, though, you can make a really simple meal that seems fancy. Pasta with pesto sauce is one of those things.

The basil pesto you're probably familiar with--garlicky, silky, rich, and bright green--is usually made with pine nuts. Unfortunately, thanks to climate change, there is currently a pine-nut shortage, which means they are craaaaazy expensive. I saw them selling for almost $30 a pound at the store. The good news is you can substitute other nuts. I've seen recipes that substitute cashews, which in my opinion are kind of bland. I decided to go with walnuts. That...walnutty...flavor (I'm at a loss to describe it...if you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it), I think, meshes well with the other flavors, and you still get that same sense of nuttiness you get from pine nuts.

If you eat at my house, you'll always come away with a sense of nuttiness.

Walnut Basil Pesto

When I threw this together, my measurements were a little fast and loose. These are just my estimates. Play around with the amounts until you get the combination of flavors and consistency you like.

2 cups (neither packed too tightly nor too loosely) fresh basil, chopped

4 large cloves garlic

1/3 cup walnut pieces, lightly toasted

1/3 cup olive oil

1/4 cup grated parmesan or similar hard cheese

1 tsp kosher or sea salt

1 tsp black pepper

Throw it all in a food processor and pulse until it's a paste. Alternatively, if you don't have a food processor, but do have a broad, sharp knife, you can do it the way nonna did back in the old country and rock your blade back and forth over the pile of basil leaves, garlic, and walnuts until it's very finely minced, and then just mix it up with the other ingredients. By the way, simply omit the cheese for vegan goodness.

This should make enough for 4-5 cups pasta. I just tossed it with some angel hair and some cooked chicken. Fast, easy, delicious.