Archive for April, 2008
It is a good day when I realize it’s 5:45, I have no idea what’s for dinner, and there’s a bowl of leftover rice and peas in the fridge.
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, my favorite 5 minute dinner is fried rice. You can make it out of anything. (So long as you have rice.)
Here’s what you do:
Heat up a skillet with a drizzle of canola oil (and sesame oil, if you have some).
Throw in the cold rice, some frozen peas if they aren’t already in with the rice, and a little blob of curry paste or powder. Break in an egg and scramble it up off to one side. Toss in some raw or cooked shrimp – I keep a bag in the freezer and run a handful under the tap to thaw. Pork, chicken or tofu also work well (I wish I had a bit of that tenderloin from last night), but the shrimp-curry combo is a good one.
Season with soy sauce or salt (soy sauce is salty) and pepper. Done.
W is not yet a curry fan, so he ate some chicken tortellini I had boiled at lunchtime, tossed with pesto. Hey, at least it’s green.
I had a few bites of each of their dinners to tide me over until 8, when I’m meeting my friend J for cider and wings.
April 30 2008 | leftovers and one dish and seafood and vegetarian | 2 Comments »
It is purely by coincidence that the day I cleaned out my freezer and discovered no fewer than 5 bags of frozen chopped rhubarb I had squirreled away last summer was the very same day I noticed the first few shoots of rhubarb poking out of the ground.
I didn’t have the gumption to bake a pie, and there was at least 5 pies’ worth of rhubarb there anyway. So I stirred some into muffins; a recipe from Nigella’s Feast that she credits to Bev Laing of Edmonton, and the rest I dumped into a pot with the better part of a bag of frozen cranberries, some sugar and a spoonful of orange juice concentrate, and cooked it into cranberry-rhubarb sauce. (Or compote, if you want to be fancy about it.) I mean, why not? Both are red and tart; it’s like they were meant for each other.
I had a thawed pork tenderloin that needed cooking, so I rubbed it down with a bit of cumin, paprika, brown sugar, salt and pepper, then a little oil, and grilled it. I didn’t really care what I did to it; the pork was a mere vehicle for the sauce. While it grilled (or vice versa) I boiled some brown and wild rice the way I’d cook pasta – in lots of water – for about 45 minutes, and threw in some thawed frozen peas for the last 5 minutes. (W will eat rice, and rice with stuff in it, but the peas cannot stand alone.) A great fiber combo – brown and wild rice are of course good sources of fiber, but peas are even better, containing about 4 times as much as the rice.
The leftover sauce went into a bowl with some plain yogurt, oats, raisins and the grated remains of W’s half-eaten apple, and was stirred together to make muesli for breakfast and to dip into for the rest of the week. (The oats will absorb the moisture overnight, making it nice and thick.)
April 29 2008 | breakfast and on the grill and pork | No Comments »
Let me clarify: chocolate-dipped cheesecake pops are not something I would typically make for dessert on a plain old Monday night. I made them for the Eyeopener because tomorrow I’m going to chat about food blogs. Thinking I’d choose a recipe from one of my favorite sites, I hopped around a few and found that Cream Puffs in Venice, Tartelette, and another blog I stumbled through were all posting cheesecake pops. As I was perusing them my friend S emailed from Whistler, where she is apparently hooked on something from the local chocolate shop called cheesecake bombs. I took this as an unmistakable sign that I should make some. What a hero I’m going to be in the studio tomorrow morning!
The pie was to make use of leftover spaghetti; I did a few segments debunking common cooking myths on BT this morning, and as a result had plenty of leftover cooked pasta that was used to demonstrate the myth that adding oil to the cooking water prevents it from sticking together. (It’s a large volume of water, kept at a rolling boil with space for the spaghetti to move around, that keeps it from sticking. In fact, adding oil to your water will result in an oil slick on your pasta once you drain it, and your sauce won’t stick very well.)
Spaghetti Pie.
I’ve seen many versions of spaghetti pie, some in which the pasta is tossed with the sauce and cheese, then baked, others that have the crust par-baked first to crisp it up, and others with layers of cottage cheese between the noodles and sauce.
So I improvised: tossed the leftover spaghetti with some egg white (I had some whose yolks had been used to make lemon curd), a bit of grated Parmesan, a grinding of pepper and a big spoonful of pesto, just because there was some open in the fridge and W is such a fan, then spread the spaghetti into an oiled pie plate, pushing it up the sides a bit.
I had requests for spinach sauce, but had hastily crumbled and cooked a couple lean Italian sausages, a red pepper, a few fresh tomatoes that had gone too wrinkly for anything but cooking with and a can of tomatoes before remembering this, and pureed sausage, I imagine, is not a Good Thing. So I decided to proceed as if it were a lasagna – I crumbled some ricotta and thawed, squeezed-out spinach over the crust,
topped it with the sauce…
and some grated part-skim mozzarella, and baked it at 350F for about half an hour, until all was golden, crispy-edged and bubbly. Yum.
The cheesecake pops were simple, really, mostly because I didn’t make the cheesecake from scratch like the others did. Some advised making a cheesecake and then scooping up balls of it with your hands, freezing them and then dipping the frozen wads in chocolate. Because I couldn’t envision blaspheming a cheesecake that way, nor attempting to cut one into teeny fancy shapes using a cookie cutter (too thick for any in my collection) I decided to buy one of those small plain frozen Safeway cheeesecakes and cut it into wedges. It worked perfectly.
After inserting the sticks (bamboo skewers, although popsicle sticks or the 4″ lollipop sticks you can buy at Michael’s would work brilliantly), I put them back in the freezer to solidify while I melted some chocolate chips in the microwave, then half dipped, half spread the melted chocolate onto the frozen wedges. Some sprinkles or other decoration would have worked out well, but I didn’t really have anything. That’s the beauty of radio; you don’t really need to accessorize.
April 28 2008 | cake and dessert and freezable and one dish and pasta and sweet stuff | 8 Comments »
After three nights and four days of events, I got home from Banff mid-afternoon and didn’t much feel like cooking dinner. But it occurred to me that W hasn’t had anything green for a long time, and I didn’t feel like take-out or cereal, either. So I sucked it up and made a quick batch of spinach spaghetti sauce while the pasta boiled.
You do this by sautéing a bunch of spinach (or half a bag of the prewashed stuff) in a little canola oil, until it wilts; pour your tomato sauce overtop (or go the other way; heat up the sauce and stir in the spinach until it wilts), pour it into the food processor and whiz until it’s smooth. Voilá – spinach that is undetectable to a two year old.
April 27 2008 | freezable and one dish and pasta and vegetarian | 4 Comments »
Nik and I did another 2 events today in Red Deer, then drove back to Calgary, picked up W and drove to Banff. Because someone had given her a Starbucks card that was tainting her wallet (she is a tea importer, remember) she insited on pulling over to use it. Probably a good idea; the latte was likely what kept me awake through all that driving.
The Calgary-Banff drive was from 5:45- 7:15, so technically that was dinner, along with the whole wheat tortilla I slathered with peanut butter and wrapped around a banana for W and I to share on the way out the door – my favorite mad dash meal to go. We share one for a snack or he can down the whole thing if it’s lunch or dinnertime; it’s an easy way to get protein, healthy fats and complex carbohydrates into something you can eat with one hand. (Generally I like to use just-peanut peanut butter, but W has become picky about the mouthfeel, so I gave in to Kraft light, which I personally adore… it’s not a whole lot better than the regular stuff, but slightly sweeter and less lardy-tasting. I’m starting to mix them half and half, in an attempt to wean him back onto the other stuff. Now that I think of it, a sprinkle of ground flaxseed between PB and banana would likely go undetected.)
Not a bad dinner, really, paired with the (Venti) 2% latte, which contains 240 calories, 9 g fat (6 of them saturated) and 16 g protein (much better than the white hot chocolate, which weighs in at 640 calories and 28 g fat).
So I should have quit while I was ahead. When we got to Banff we met her boys (4, 6 and 37) at the St. James Gate for something we could actually chew, anything that wasn’t traditionally served at high tea. I didn’t think it was possible to make bad meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
I stand corrected.
April 26 2008 | eating out | 2 Comments »
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Throw in the cold rice, some frozen peas if they aren’t already in with the rice, and a little blob of curry paste or powder. Break in an egg and scramble it up off to one side. Toss in some raw or cooked shrimp – I keep a bag in the freezer and run a handful under the tap to thaw. Pork, chicken or tofu also work well (I wish I had a bit of that tenderloin from last night), but the shrimp-curry combo is a good one.
I had a few bites of each of their dinners to tide me over until 8, when I’m meeting my friend J for cider and wings.
