Archive for September, 2008
Today I wanted baked pasta. Lazy lasagna or something of that genre; tomato sauce, crispy cheese, maybe some spinach or sausage, stocky pasta you can pick up with a fork, like ziti, which is hard to find (unless you’re at the Italian market) so I usually substitute penne.
I had a container of spreadable black pepper goat cheese with a looming expiry date, and thought that instead of dropping spoonfuls of ricotta on my baked/faked lasagna, I’d drop bits of that. I went to get out the penne and remembered my vow to not buy any more pasta until I used up the collection of unusual shapes I always feel inclined to buy and then don’t know what the (H E double hockey sticks) to do with.
I was penneless. And truthfully, sick of the whole wheat rotini that has become W’s Puppy Chow. So I pulled out a bag of pennoni giganti (giant penne) and decided to just use it. They resembled mini cannelloni, so I imagined myself piping a lovely goat cheese mixture into each one (using a ziploc bag with the corner snipped off) and baking them topped with tomato sauce and cheese.
After boiling them, they were twice their dry size and sat there like big slippery tubes of calamari. You can imagine how gracefully I filled them with a runny mixture of goat cheese, egg, spinach, sautéed zucchini and garlic. It’s a good thing we have a dog.
I quickly realized that pure goat cheese would be far too intense as a filling on its own – not like ricotta – and so tried to loosen it up with an egg and add some wilted spinach. Bagged spinach, by the way, is perfect to throw into the freezer - when you need chopped spinach you just crush the bag with your hands and it shatters, saving you the chopping. The second half of my bagged spinach always ends up in the freezer. So this time it ended up in a hot skillet with a bit of oil, and cooked down to practically nothing, so I panicked, rooted through my fridge and came out with a zucchini (roasted red peppers or sun dried tomatoes would have been good too), chopped it and sautéed it with a couple cloves of garlic, and added that too. And a spoonful of pesto. I just needed to bulk it up enough to fill the $%#!%@!! giant penne.
So I filled them as best I could, laid them awkwardly in a baking dish, poured tomato sauce over top, and grated part-skim mozzarella and Parmesan over that. Then baked it at 350 until it was bubbly and golden.
It turned out to closely resemble a lasagna; I could cut it into squares, even. Mike thought it was superb. And although I took the longest route possible to get my baked pasta (high-maintenance lasagna you might say; the opposite of lazy) it was exactly what I wanted for dinner.
The End.
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September 10 2008 | cheese and one dish and pasta and vegetarian | 12 Comments »
The lamb souvlaki were a cheap cheat: I stopped at the Superstore this afternoon and they were 50% off on account of their Sept. 11 expiration date. Works for me.
Greek-style lamb on a stick gave me a good excuse to try roasted lemon & oregano potatoes again, and the roasted chick peas with chard would have been a good pairing, but it appears the slugs have beat me to it. So instead, since I was firing up the grill for the souvlaki, I sliced a zucchini lengthwise and brushed it with some garlicky oil (borrowed from the potatoes) and threw them on the grill beside the kabobs. And that was it, except for the corn.
I needed corn to act as transport for the compound butter that was left over from CBC this morning. Compound butters are really just softened butter spiked with other ingredients and then chilled; in this case a clove of garlic, a squirt of lime juice, shot of chipotle Tabasco sauce and a few snipped chives from the garden. (Maple syrup or honey and chopped toasted pecans is good too.) Turns out it not only doctors up corn; I put some on W’s rice (he’s not a potato guy, especially when saturated with ”spicy” lemon) and I might have slipped a chunk of potato into the ramekin too. Yum.
Garlic, Lime & Chipotle Butter
Measurements are approximate; let them be dictated by your taste.
1/2 cup butter, softened
juice of 1 lime (or about 2 Tbsp. – add a bit of finely grated zest too if you like)
1 tsp. chipotle Tabasco sauce or chipotles in adobo, finely smooshed
1 garlic clove, finely crushed
Mix it all up, scrape into a ramekin and chill.
September 09 2008 | lamb and on the grill | 4 Comments »
Corn is here. There aint much of it, due to our cool spring/early summer and stormy July, but it’s finally here. Just as summer is heading out the door.
I flipped through Nigella Express, which I picked up at the library (hey, I’m not independantly wealthy enough to buy every cookbook I want, OK? I forgot to marry rich) and she had a recipe for corn soup topped with tortilla chips and melted cheese, which I thought was rather brilliant. You know, like French onion soup is topped with crusty bread and cheese, only you use corn tortillas and cheddar or queso fresco or Monterey Jack. They weren’t weighed down with nearly enough cheese though; I fixed that. Or so I thought… when I went to float my nice organic blue corn tortilla chips on top of my soup, they quickly sank like a Battleship. (Good thing I gave it a spin before bringing it into the CBC studio tomorrow morning.)
It was an easy soup to make; scrape the kernels off of 5-6 ears of corn (hold them upright in the middle of an angel food cake pan and cut the kernels off into the surrounding pan – or use 1 kg frozen corn, as N suggests) and put it into the food processor with a bunch of green onions (debearded) and a clove of garlic; I added a pinch of cumin and a seeded tiny small red hot pepper (she suggests sprinkling hot pepper bits on top, for garnish). Pulse it all up and throw into a pot with 1.5L of veg or chicken stock. Simmer 15 minutes, while you toast some tortilla chips topped with grated cheese. I wasn’t told to add a splash of half & half at the end, but it seemed to need it. Not much – not even a quarter cup; besides that, it contains no fat to speak of (remember that nothing was even sauteed in oil before going in).
It was OK. I mean, I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it either. I just wasn’t that into it. Mike liked it, but he seems to be particularly easy to please these days, so not the best litmus test. Maybe if it was chunkier it would have supported the tortillas better? I’m curious how Nigella’s food stylists got the teepee of tortillas to hover on the surface of her soup without sinking. I didn’t add too much liquid. Perhaps not enough corn?
I paused just now and went downstairs and tried it one more time, now lukewarm. It has the potential to grow on me. It tastes exactly like something you should eat when you’re sick; fresh and reviving from all the green onion (more than the 3 the recipe called for) and tiniest hit from the pepper, which gives it just enough heat.
Maybe you can learn to love after all.
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September 08 2008 | soup and vegetarian | 9 Comments »
I spent hardly 10 minutes at home today: left at 8:45 for a 9am meeting, pulled up long enough for M to fling W into the car and head out to Calaway Park (which was slightly dampened – pun totally intended – by W peeing my pants as I frantically searched for a bathroom in the back corner by the big rig ride. I wasn’t sure that peeing on trees was perfectly appropriate in the middle of the park; as a result, I spent the rest of the day looking like I was a little too fragile for the roller coaster or Tilt-a-Whirl.)
Stopped again at home long enough to let the dog pee, change my own peed-on clothes (a lot of my world these days revolves around pee), grab a brown and wild rice salad I made last night, and paint some pesto on a side of salmon to bring over to my parents’ house to feed whomever was tired of chips and pizza. Because: It`s Moving Day. (Likely the first of many.)
So it was Pesto Salmon and brown and wild rice salad with fruit & pecans for dinner, two things you’re more than a little familiar with by now.
Fortunately, or I’d be left with no recipe offerings, I made too much brown and wild rice last night and so turned the excess into pudding spiked with maple. This is easy to do and really requires no recipe; whether the rice starts out cooked or not, you put it in a pot with some milk or cream, and cook it until it absorbs it all. How much you use will depend on whether or not the grains are already cooked, obviously. Keep adding milk until it’s as creamy as you like it, then sweeten with maple syrup, honey or sugar, add a splash of vanilla if you like, and stir in some dried cranberries or other fruit. The cranberries go well with the nutty wild rice and maple, I think. You end up with a pudding that can pull double duty as breakfast, with brown and wild rice being great sources of protein and fiber.
But if you insist on a recipe, here you go:
Maple Brown & Wild Rice Pudding with Dried Cranberries
Substitute 1 ½ cups of wild rice blend instead of the brown and wild rices if you like, and use any kind of chopped dried fruit. This makes a fab breakfast.
3/4 cup wild rice
3/4 cup brown rice
3 cups milk (any kind, or a combination of milk and half and half for creamier pudding)
1/3 cup pure maple syrup (or more to taste)
1/2 cup dried cranberries
Combine 5 cups of water, the wild rice and brown rice in a medium saucepan set over medium-high heat, and bring to a boil. Reduce the temperature to a simmer, cover and cook for 50 minutes, until very tender. Drain and return to the pot.
Add milk and maple syrup, and cook on medium-low until almost all the milk has been absorbed. Taste and add more maple syrup, if it needs it. Remove from heat and stir in the cranberries.
Cool completely, then refrigerate either in the pot or spooned into individual bowls. Makes about 6 cups.
Per ½ cup (using 2% milk): 136 calories, 1 g fat (0.5 g saturated fat, 0.3 g polyunsaturated fat, 0.2 g monounsaturated fat), 4.6 g protein, 27.6 g carbohydrate, 2.4 g cholesterol, 1.4 g fiber. 7% calories from fat.
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September 07 2008 | dessert and grains and sweet stuff | No Comments »
Sometimes when I spell out my dinners they sound far fancier than they were; other times they just come across as weird.
My sister came over for dinner tonight, and I had planned to make a quick shrimp curry, but when the possibility of my 18 year old nephew joining her arose, I wanted to tip the scales in favour of him coming and so switched the menu to burgers. There were a bunch in the freezer leftover from Stampede that weren`t going to eat themselves.
But I went ahead with the pakoras: one of the foodstuffs that came my way as my Mom purged her kitchen cupboards was half a bag of Chatty`s Pakora Mix – something it would probably never occur to me to buy, but she had brought home from the Bay or some odd place and said the pakoras is made were actually pretty tasty. The ingredient list is pretty innocent, as far as mixes go: chick pea flour and spices, really. (They were smart enough to not list the spices, so I can`t go and recreate it myself.) It`s a Saskatoon company, so I really don`t mind just buying a bag. Sometimes the unknown just tastes better anyway.
All you do is blend the mustard-yellow mix and water into a paste, then stir in finely chopped onion, potato and cabbage - I cut one onion, three small (unpeeled) Yukon gold potatoes and a wedge of cabbage into chunks and blitzed them in the food processor into smallish bits – and fry the barely coated veg in about an inch of canola oil. I made sure I had a jar of chutney to go with – coincidentally it was the same brand – a jar I got in my stocking at Christmas of Chatty`s Tomato & Fruit Chutney. Now listen to this ingredient list: tomatoes, sugar, vinegar, apples, apricots, dates, prunes, raisins, ginger, salt, spices and olive oil. Who needs pakoras when I have a drawer full of spoons?
It would appear that both of us have inherited our Dad`s desperate need for something sweet after dinner because later, as we sat drinking our Tim Horton`s coffees, we were both distracted by the thought of chocolate chip cookie dough. So we made some; a small batch, to enforce portion control.
Me: Should we really bother baking any of this?
A: No.
Pause.
A: You should just serve it straight up in individual ramekins, and take a picture for your blog. (Exit stage right to the garden to retrieve a photogenic sprig of fresh mint.)
And so we did, with small teaspoons for transport. (We like to class things up a little.)
September 06 2008 | appetizers and snacks and veg | 6 Comments »
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