Archive for January, 2008
By happy coincidence, I flipped on Nigella Express yesterday just in time to see her snipping rolled-up corn tortillas into a hot skillet to brown and crisp them before adding a slurry of egg, tomatoes and chopped fresh chilies. Hey, good idea, and using things I happen to currently have in my kitchen. I don’t usually keep fresh corn tortillas on hand, but when I do I’m always looking for new ways to use them, since they come in a 50-pack. (Tomorrow, the rest are going into the freezer, to resurface later on in the year.)
So, since Mike is playing an afternoon show and heading straight out afterwards, I’m cooking for one. Well, one and a half, but the half just downed a whole wheat tortilla spread with peanut butter and wrapped around a banana, and close to his own weight in dried apricots (thankfully we’ve just passed the diaper stage). I’m in just the mood for a bowl of spicy eggs with lots of crispy bits, so thought I’d give Nigella’s recipe a whirl – the only thing I’m missing is the black satin wrap dress. I’m not convinced this is the best choice of outfits when cooking something that splatters anyway.
It was fast, it was easy. Although I have toasted many a corn tortilla, it never occurred to me to cut them into strips first. The long, thin pieces browned quickly, and I bet they’d be fantastic on a salad. As for the jalapeno, it doesn’t make things as hot as you’d think. (And I’m sorry for the recurring theme – but I had a bag in the fridge since researching that article on chilies, and I hate wasting things, even when it’s a jalapeno pepper that cost all of 6 cents.) To turn the heat down a bit, remove the seeds and membranes, which account for about 80% of the capsaicin - the substance that makes chilies burn. If you do, you can get away with using a whole jalapeno for 2 eggs (if I can do it, so can you - I’m a wuss when it comes to spicy food). Halved grape tomatoes go perfectly into eggs without watering them down with excessive juice. Beyond the tomatoes, this would have been fab with any number of toss-ins: mushrooms, chunks of asparagus, bits of ham…
I did resist the urge to smother it in cheese. Until halfway through, that is, when I remembered the chunk of queso fresco (fresh cheese) I had acquired at La Tiendona market awhile ago (along with the corn tortillas) and forgotten in the depths of the fridge. It would really be a shame to not use it before it goes slimy. And creamy, salty, ultra-meltable and almost feta-esque queso fresco would really go well with the spicy-soft eggs and crispy shards of tortilla. It was like a breakfast burrito bomb exploded deliciously on my plate. Perfect Saturday afternoon couch food.
Spicy Scrambled Eggs with Crispy Corn Tortilla Strips (for one – bump up the ingredients as necessary for the number of people you want to feed)
Canola or olive oil, for cooking with
1-2 small corn tortillas
1 jalapeno or small red chile pepper, seeded and minced
a small handful of grape tomatoes, halved
1 chopped green onion (optional
2 eggs
salt and pepper
Heat a good drizzle of oil in a skillet set over medium-high heat, and cook the tortilla strips, tossing them about occasionally, until golden and crisp. Transfer to a plate. Add the jalapeno and tomatoes (the juice will make them splatter) and cook for a minute, until the tomato begins to soften and darken on the edges.
In a small bowl, beat the eggs with a fork, adding a drizzle of water or milk if you like. Add to the hot pan, along with the green onion, if you’re using it, and some salt and pepper. Gently push the eggs around in the skillet, allowing the uncooked egg to run underneath the cooked egg. Turn the heat off while they are still slightly runny, and allow them to finish cooking with their own heat; you want them to be nice and creamy, not hard and curd-like which is how overcooked scrambled eggs often end up.
Add the crispy tortilla strips to the pan, toss to combine them, then transfer to a wide, shallow bowl and eat on the couch.
January 27 2008 | eggs and one dish and vegetarian | No Comments »
We ate the last of the pot of black bean soup today, and I’ll miss it – the soup silently helped meet our daily vegetable quota all week. It was pretty fantastic, actually, despite being completely vegetarian – vegan, even (no offense to meatless meals, but I usually prefer a bit of smoky ham or spicy sausage to flavor my black bean soup). Despite this shortcoming, it was absolutely delicious, due in part to the lone fresh jalapeño, and to the fact that it had had so much time for the flavors to really get to know each other. I am never going to feel the need to add meat to a black bean soup again. Since I had already eaten several bowls of it this week, today I felt experimental, and crumbled a bit of feta overtop.)
We ate it before going to my nephew Ben’s birthday party, as insurance against the plethora of fifth-birthday-party-food that was sure to be there. Not that hunger has a lot to do with it in the presence of cheesies, chicken wings and cupcakes, but being starving upon arrival doesn’t help. Plus, a bowlful of veggies and beans acts as a sort of nutritional ballast against all that yummy junk.
Black Bean Soup
This soup improves in flavor and spiciness after a day or two in the fridge. To make a meal of black bean soup a little more substantial, put a scoop of rice into each bowl and ladle the soup over it. A crumbled spicy Italian sausage or bit of diced ham is also delicious – sauté either along with the onion at the beginning – this will of course cook the sausage, but adding either at the beginning will allow it to flavor the entire pot of soup, something that wouldn’t happen if it was thrown in at the end.
A drizzle of olive or canola oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped, including the leafy parts
1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and minced, or 1 Tbsp. chopped canned chipotle chilies
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 small red or yellow bell pepper, seeded and chopped
2 tsp. ground cumin
1 19 oz. (540 mL) can black beans, drained
1 can sweet corn niblets (optional)
1 14 oz. (398 mL) or 28 oz. (798 mL) can diced or stewed tomatoes
1-2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
Salt and pepper
Sour cream, chopped cilantro, chopped green onions and/or crumbled feta cheese (optional
Heat the oil in a large saucepan set over medium-high heat and sauté the onion, carrot and celery for about 5 minutes, until they begin to soften. Finely chop the jalapeño, removing the seeds first if you don’t want your soup to be too hot – the seeds contain the most heat. Add them to the pot along with the garlic, red pepper, and cumin and cook for another minute. Add the beans and tomatoes, without draining either of them, and the chicken stock. Bring the soup to a boil, reduce the heat to low, cover and cook for 15-20 minutes, until the carrot is tender.
If you like, you could use a blender, food processor, or hand-held immersion blender to process about half of the soup until smooth, then return it to the pot. Process as much or as little of the soup as you want to make the consistency as chunky or smooth as you like, or leave it all chunky, which is what I did. Turn the heat down and simmer the soup uncovered for half an hour or so to allow it to thicken slightly. Season to taste with salt and pepper. You could eat it right away, but I like to cool it down and then stash the whole pot in the fridge for a day or two to allow the flavors to improve. Reheat in individual bowls as you need it, or pull the pot out of the fridge, set it back on the stovetop, and heat it through.
Serve hot, with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkle of cilantro, green onions and/or feta cheese on top to add a cool and creamy relief to the spicy soup.
January 25 2008 | beans and soup and vegetarian | 9 Comments »
The biggest health risk associated with having children: leftovers. The cheesy crusts and crispy bits you clean off their plates when they don’t. When there isn’t enough to go back into the fridge, it goes into my mouth.
There were 5 of them (children, that is) around the table today, all there due to various unforeseen circumstances – Ben (who will be 5 tomorrow) had a fever last night and so was kept out of school, Emily (9) had a P.D. day, and Cole (3) and Hugo (2) were out with their mum at the giant lulu lemon sale I kept hearing about on the news, and stopped by after to say hello and play with toys.
As anyone who has ever cooked for a child can confirm, feeding children can be complicated. There are many prejudices connected with food. Plenty of fanaticism, and just as much apathy. Senses that detect color, smell, texture and general weirdness are heightened at the dinner table. I would love to see Gordon Ramsay do a reality show forcing him to feed a room full of elementary and preschool children every day – it might bring new meaning to the phrase hell’s kitchen.
Because this dinner party wasn’t planned, I didn’t have much of a variety of typically child-friendly food. Ben must have only orange cheese and eat on blue or green plates, Emily is lactose intolerant, Cole and Hugo are accustomed to familiar ingredients lovingly arranged by their mum into smiley faces and such. They all expected juice, but all I had was pomegranate, which actually went over well (we mix it with soda water to make “pink pop”.)
Fortunately (except for Emily, who can’t eat cheese), I had a package of fresh spinach and cheese ravioli – perfect for small mouths. No tomato sauce of any description (hey, we planned a shopping trip before two of these urchins arrived on our doorstep at 7am), but there were two thawed Spolumbo’s sausages (upon unwrapping them from their paper I was relieved to find they were benign turkey & cranberry – phew) which I cooked up as the pasta boiled. Once drained, I added the ravioli to the sausage pan, which had been drizzled with canola oil that took up the flavor of the meat and made it glisten more than its leanness would otherwise allow it to, and tossed it about to share the flavor and brown its edges. The last of a jar of pesto – Willem’s favorite, but apparently not Cole’s – got dribbled over the mix. (Had there only been grownups eating, I would have added a handful of baby spinach leaves and let them wilt.)
Oh right – the cupcakes. Because it’s Ben’s birthday tomorrow, something he mentioned only several thousand times over the course of the day, we came up with an activity to celebrate the occasion of Birthday Eve. What else to do but make cupcakes? Chocolate, of course, with chocolate icing and tiny colored sprinkles. The great thing about chocolate cake is that it is fantastic made with canola oil – one of the very best oils for baking and eating, providing a healthy balance of mono- and polyunsaturated fats as well as omega 3s. Cocoa delivers maximum chocolate flavor without fat, and you can usually get away with using whole wheat flour, or at least half and half, since the dark chocolate masks its color.
Chocolate Cupcakes
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (or any combination of all-purpose and whole-wheat)
1 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup cocoa
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup milk or soy milk
1/2 cup canola oil
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup hot coffee or boiling water (I use instant decaf - it intensifies and deepens the chocolate flavor without adding fat or calories
Preheat oven to 350° F. Line 24 cupcake tins with paper liners (or, more realistically, 12 at a time).
In a large bowl, stir together the flour, brown sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Break up any lumps of brown sugar and cocoa.
Add the milk, oil, eggs and vanilla and beat with an electric mixer on medium speed for about 2 minutes. Add the coffee and beat on low speed just until blended. The batter will be thin.
Divide the batter among the tins, filling them about 2/3 full, and bake for 25 minutes, until the tops are springy to the touch. Tip them a bit in their pans to let the steam escape and help them cool. Wait until they are completely cool before frosting them. These are delicious absolutely plain. Makes 2 dozen.
January 24 2008 | dessert and one dish and pasta and snacks and sweet stuff | 3 Comments »
I’d like to preface this post by saying that I don’t plan dinners ahead with this website in mind. Although you’d think that might be a good idea, I think doing it that way would sort of miss the point. It’s 4:17 pm now, and I’m just starting to think about what’s for dinner. As always, sometimes I do plan ahead, but just as often, I do not.
There are two avocados about to go seriously downhill in our fruit bowl, so Mike turned them into guacamole. Guac has always been Mike’s thing; there is never even a question as to whether I should make it. (He took this task on years ago, when I was out of town and he called my hotel to ask me how to make it. I told him to mash up the avocado and add some lime juice, salt, and a clove of garlic. He took “clove” to mean “head”, and added the whole thing. Said it was fantastic. He was so proud he made it for me again when I got home and I think 3 years later I still have garlic breath. He has since learned the proper meaning of “garlic clove”.) So he mashed it all up and we added the few strawberry tomatoes left sitting on the counter. Small tomatoes are perfect to stir into guacamole; they are more meat, less juice and seeds, so it doesn’t go all runny. I imagine roasted tomatoes would do just fine too. Especially if you roast them with a few cloves of garlic, drizzled with olive oil…
Sometimes, when I have a bizarre assortment of ingredients in the fridge and not much in the way of creative juices, I go to Epicurious.com (one of my favorite sites) and just plunk them into the search bar – asparagus, ricotta and halibut – for example. I did this today, just out of curiosity, and came up with Huevos Divorciados, which sounds like something you might make when you’re fighting with your significant other and need sustenance to fuel your fire. It actually looks pretty good, but requires of the cook the gumption to make two salsas from scratch. So I cooked/baked the corn tortillas I picked up at the market last week (when I was shopping for chilies – 50 of them for $3) into chips, and we used them to scoop up the guacamole while waiting for the pot of black bean soup I made on the weekend and forgot was still sitting in the barbecue to thaw out. (A great backup fridge/freezer in wintertime when you run out of fridge space – putting it inside the barbecue keeps any potentially curious critters out.) Black bean soup keeps incredibly well, so it’s a good thing to have in the fridge to dip into all week. Plus, fortuitously, it goes well with corn tortilla chips and guacamole. You’d almost think I planned it that way.
You can make tortilla chips a couple ways: on the stovetop, simply heat them in a drizzle of oil in a hot skillet, turning them as they brown. (The huevos recipe above has a good method of cooking them two at a time this way.) To oven bake, first stack a bunch and cut them into wedges. Lay them out on a cookie sheet and brush them lightly with oil or just lime juice – this will allow any seasonings to adhere without adding any fat or calories. Plus it adds a nice limey flavor. Sprinkle with coarse salt, chili powder, cumin, or all of the above, and bake at 400F for 10 minutes, until they turn golden. (About 9 calories per chip, and zero fat.)
Guacamole
A simple guacamole is nothing more than ripe avocados mashed with garlic, salt and lime, but it lends itself well to all kinds of additions. Try stirring in 1/2 cup salsa or sour cream, a head of roasted garlic or a handful of chopped cooked shrimp. Because avocados are very high in fat – about 75% of its calories come from fat – guacamole is fairly high in calories as well. But take heart, it’s virtually all healthy monounsaturated fat, the kind you want to include in your diet.
Make sure your avocados are ripe or they won’t mash very well. The best way to tell if an avocado is ripe is by squeezing it – a ripe avocado will yield to gentle pressure. If you need to ripen them fast, put them in a paper bag with an apple to speed up the process.
2 ripe avocados, peeled and pitted
1 glove garlic, crushed
Juice of 1 lime
Salt to taste
1/4 tsp. ground cumin (optional)
2 Tbsp. finely chopped or grated purple onion (optional)
2 Tbsp. chopped fresh cilantro (optional)
a few chopped cherry, strawberry or grape tomatoes (optional)
Mash everything (except the tomatoes, if you’re using them) together with a fork to make it as smooth or as chunky as you like. Stir in the tomato if you’re using it.
Per serving: 111 calories, 10.3 g total fat (1.6 g saturated fat, 6.4 g monounsaturated fat, 1.3 g polyunsaturated fat), 1.4 g protein, 5.8 g carbohydrate, 0 mg cholesterol, 1.8 g fiber. 76% calories from fat.
Since there is still a large pot of black bean soup left to eat, I’m fairly certain it will end up as dinner very soon… I’ll save posting the recipe for that day.
January 23 2008 | appetizers and snacks and vegetarian | 1 Comment »
It’s becoming evident that trends are going to start appearing on this site - like everyone else in the world, there are the usual standbys we pull into service on a regular basis. Pizza is one of them, usually made with our standard whole wheat crust recipe. Which has always worked out just fine. But tonight, I got home from Edmonton at dinnertime with two batches of the no-knead bread dough bubbling away in their bowls, and thought, why not slap some onto a baking sheet and see how it works for pizza? I’m glad I did – the result was a chewy, bulbous crust like the ones you get at the Italian Supermarket on Saturday afternoons (minus the smoky charred bits they get from the wood-fired oven. When I win the lottery, I’m having one installed in my back yard. Seriously – the Canadian rep for Italian Magnaini wood-fired ovens is in Black Diamond!)
Fridge-cleaning pizzas always seem to end up better than any others, because you use up things you wouldn’t necessarily plan on combining: it appeared at first that we were out of luck in the sauce department, but then located half a jar of pesto (one of W’s favorites, despite the fact that it’s green – the kid will eat falafels and pesto but won’t touch apple juice or potatoes), which we spread over the crust. It took about a minute to cook a Spolumbo’s chicken sausage, adding the second half of a can of diced tomatoes and the last of a bag of baby spinach to the pan to let it wilt after the sausage cooked. On top, part-skim mozzarella.
Now, I’m assuming that anyone reading this has heard of the no-knead bread phenomenon – if not, you must. I’ll tell you right now that this is probably the most worthwhile recipe you’ll collect from this site. (If you go to only one movie this year, bake this bread recipe.) It was written about by Mark Bittman in the New York Times a year ago November, and it turned out to be the most emailed story in the history of the Times. Every food blogger in the known universe has tried it, and documented it. It’s absolutely fantastic. The original recipe says 12-18 hours, but I usually leave mine for 24, or however long it is between stirring it up and when I want to bake it.
If you want to turn this into pizza dough, you don’t need to flour it and let it rest on the countertop; it should be fine just scraped out of the bowl onto the pan. Either way.
No-Knead Bread
Adapted from Jim Lahey at the Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, plus more for dusting (or whole wheat, or half and half)
¼ teaspoon instant yeast (I use about 1/3 teaspoon regular active dry yeast)
1 teaspoon salt
In a large bowl stir together the flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 ½ cups plus 2 tablespoons water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap or a plate and let it rest on the countertop for 18-24 hours at room temperature.
The dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice, then roughly shape into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour. Fold it over the bread or cover with another cotton towel and let it sit for another hour or two.
While the bread is resting, preheat the oven to 450°. Put a 6-8 quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When the dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and flip the dough over into the pot; it may look like a mess, but that’s OK. Cover and bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and bake another 10-15 minutes, until it’s nice and golden. Eat up!
January 22 2008 | bread and one dish | 9 Comments »
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By happy coincidence, I flipped on Nigella Express yesterday just in time to see her snipping rolled-up corn tortillas into a hot skillet to brown and crisp them before adding a slurry of egg, tomatoes and chopped fresh chilies. Hey, good idea, and using things I happen to currently have in my kitchen. I don’t usually keep fresh corn tortillas on hand, but when I do I’m always looking for new ways to use them, since they come in a 50-pack. (Tomorrow, the rest are going into the freezer, to resurface later on in the year.)
