Archive for the 'veg' Category
Kind of a weird dinner tonight, despite my (meagre) efforts to make something relatively nice for Mike’s homecoming. It ended up an hour long battle over W not wanting to eat anything but the meat.
For some reason there was a 2-pack of farmer’s sausage in the freezer, so I took it out to thaw. I wasn’t really that familiar with farmers’ sausage, a smoky, garlicky pork sausage that needed cooking (unlike something along the lines of kielbasa). The package exclaimed “perfect for the BBQ!” so I threw one on the grill.
Mike is Ukranian. You wouldn’t know it except for the fact that his dad was #12 out of 14 kids born on a farm in Cudworth, Saskatchewan and hates cabbage rolls because he lived on them growing up. I didn’t even get the benefit of marrying into a family that makes killer peroghies using a secret family recipe. He was not forced into shumka lessons as a kid, either. My point is, sausage and cabbage are pretty Ukranian, so I intended to make something of that ilk, but then discovered that the red cabbage in my fridge was going south faster than the green cabbage, and thought I had better use it while the opportunity was there.
My Belgian grandma used to make braised red cabbage with apples, so that’s what I did. I have never been able to make it as good as my friend Sue, who is one of the best cooks I know, if not the best, and I know a lot of chefs. She sent me her recipe, but not until after I made mine (I got too frivolous with the vinegar, and it ended up too sour.)
The Braised Red Cabbage & Apples I Made
1 Tbsp. butter
1 Tbsp. canola oil
1 small head of red cabbage, quartered, cored and very thinly sliced
1 apple, grated or thinly sliced (don’t peel it)
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 cup apple juice, hard cider or red wine (or the dregs of the pear cider you forgot to finish last night and left on the counter to go flat)
2-3 Tbsp. red wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar
In a large skillet or medium pot, heat the butter and oil over medium heat. Add the cabbage, apples and salt and cook, tossing occasionally, until the cabbage begins to wilt. Add the apple juice or wine and cook for about 10 minutes, until the cabbage is wilted and the moisture has cooked off. Add the vinegar and cook for another 5 minutes, until cooked down and bright fuschia. Season with salt and pepper.
Serves 8.
Sue’s Braised Red Cabbage
(adapted from Sheila Lukins’ All Around the World Cookbook)
1 large red cabbage (approx 1 1/2 kilos), tough outer leaves discarded, then quartered and cored
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup dried cherries
1/4 cup red wine
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup apple juice
1/4 cup honey
1 cinnamon stick
salt and coarsely ground pepper to taste
1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
2. Cut the cabbage into thin slices and set aside.
3. Melt the butter in a large (5 litre/quart or so) heavy saucepan with lid or dutch oven over medium heat. Add the cherries and cook for about 2 minutes or so.
4. Add the rest of the ingredients and cook over low heat until warmed throughout, then add the lid and pop it in the oven for about an hour or so, stirring a couple of times. The cabbage will be cooked through, and the liquid thickened a bit. Taste and add a little more honey and/or vinegar as you like to suit your taste (or apple juice if it needs a bit more liquid).
Note from Sue: I usually make this a day or two ahead of Thanksgiving and Christmas, as it tastes even better after keeping in the fridge awhile. Many a time I make lots at Thanksgiving and freeze the rest for Christmas. The liquid keeps it all happy in the freezer for ages.
And because sausage and cabbage doesn’t quite make a meal, I rounded it out with a roasted sweet potato (done in the Easy Bake oven, so as to not heat up the whole house), split and dabbed with butter and drizzled with a bit of maple syrup. The long, thin ones are easiest for roasting. Or baking - same thing - why is it roast turkey but baked ham?
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May 05 2008 | veg | 1 Comment »
For the past week, W has been begging for “chepah” (translation: ketchup) almost constantly. No, nothing to dip into ketchup, just a bowl straight-up, please. When you consider that ketchup contains more sugar than ice cream does, it’s no wonder why.
Awhile ago we went for lunch at the home of two little girls, and when her mom wasn’t looking, the 4 year old flipped open the lid of the Heinz ketchup squeeze bottle and took a swig. Willem just stared, in total awe. I’m pretty sure he fell in love for the first time at that moment.
So this afternoon I made some yam fries to justify providing him with his beloved chepah. Conveniently, someone just asked for a recipe for sweet potato fries. Does this mean I’m now taking requests?
In case you’re wondering, yams and sweet potatoes are very similar - the only difference is that yams have a darker flesh, and sweet potatoes have a more flesh-colored flesh. They are very often mislabelled in grocery stores though, so you may end up with one instead of the other. Yams are usually bigger around, and sweet potatoes narrower.
So now for the recipe. You don’t really need a recipe per se to make yam fries, just a few tips.
1) slice your yam, without peeling it, into fry shapes or into quarters and then slices - this is easier to do if you want them to be consistent.
2) drizzle some canola oil on a rimmed cookie sheet and put it in the oven. Turn the oven on to 400-450F - either will work, or anything in between.
3) when the oven is hot, take the pan out and spread out the yams on it, tossing them about carefully to get them more or less coated in oil. The combination of hot pan, hot oil will keep them from sticking, just like it does on the stovetop. Make sure that they aren’t too crowded, or they will steam instead of browning properly.
4) bake them for 20 minutes or so (really depending on the thickness of the fries and how hot your oven is), tossing them around and flipping them once or twice, until golden. Sprinkle with coarse salt.
5) serve with plenty of chepah.
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March 09 2008 | snacks and veg and vegetarian | 3 Comments »
I’ll never understand why battered frozen fish pieces are considered a convenience food. How convenient are they, when they take 25 minutes in the oven vs. 10 for a fresh fillet of salmon? This is real fast food.
I adore asparagus, and my favorite way to cook it is to roast it until the tips turn dark and crunchy. It occurred to me that both could be done at once; the asparagus started (on a rimmed cookie sheet, drizzled with oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper) and then pushed aside to make room for the salmon during the last 10 minutes of cooking time. But we had lots of both, so after 20 minutes in the oven, we slid the salmon on its own sheet onto the rack above. Easy peasy. I threw some brown and wild rice in a pot to boil for 45 minutes (I always cook both together since they have the same cooking time, and in lots of water, like pasta, to make things easy) to be sure W would actually eat something on the table, but he scarfed down his third of the salmon filet before starting in on ours. The asparagus, however, was a no go. More for us.
Roasted Balsamic Glazed Salmon and Asparagus:
Preheat the oven to 450F.
Snap the tips off your asparagus wherever they naturally break. I used two small bunches. Drizzle a cookie sheet with canola or olive oil and spread the asparagus out on it, tossing it around to coat with oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and pop in the oven.
Place your salmon fillet skin side down on a foil-lined sheet (or if it’s small, wait to put it on the sheet with the asparagus). In a small dish, stir together 2 Tbsp. brown sugar or honey, 2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar, 1 Tbsp. grainy mustard and 1 tsp. sesame oil. Spread over the salmon.
After about 20 minutes (depending on how thick your asparagus is and how well done you want them) push them aside and add the salmon to the pan, or slide the sheet with the salmon on it onto the oven rack above (or below) it. Cook for 10 minutes per inch, until it flakes around the edges.
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February 18 2008 | fish and veg | 1 Comment »
Confession: this was lunch, not dinner. Does it count that it was the most memorable meal of the day, and in fact one of my favorite meals of all time? Because we went to Mike’s mom’s for dinner, and my thinking is if you don’t have anything nice to say, maybe stick to the lunch story.
Sue went back to Vernon at about noon, so before she left we poached some eggs from the market - todays’ eggs came from one of the colonies, but when the lamb farmers are around we get our eggs from them - so big they have to be staggered in their carton and it’s impossible to close the lid, most of them with a double yolk, each the size and color of a plump dried apricot. I had just baked a crusty loaf of no-knead bread, which we toasted and buttered thick slices of and slid the softly poached eggs on top. (Note: I do not add vinegar to the cooking water when I poach eggs. I don’t like my eggs tasting vinegary, and the ragged whites don’t bother me one bit. Did you know you can pre-poach your eggs, and keep them in a dish of their cooking water in the fridge? Reheat them by slipping into a pan of simmering water for a few seconds. Which isn’t to say poached eggs are so high-maintenance they require advance preparation, but it’s good to know if you’re ever cooking for large numbers, or want to do a few at a time to stash in the fridge for a small child.)
There is really no better combination than a good quality egg, good bread and butter, sprinkled with crisp, flaky salt. We shopped at The Cookbook Company yesterday, and because when I teach classes part of my payment comes in the form of store credit, we decided to go and be frivolous, picking up things like $12 smoked Maldon salt and fig-caramel sauce. You wouldn’t think that your choice of salt would make one iota of difference here, but the crunchy flakes were wonderful.
I am a fan of crunchy pan-fries, but when I eat a large pile of them for breakfast, inevitably as an accompaniment to some bread product, I feel like I swallowed a sack of potatoes afterward. The very best company to a poached egg on toast, in my humble opinion, is a fresh bunch of spinach, lightly sautéed in a little butter and olive oil, with a clove of garlic. Heaven.
Add a small knob of butter and a drizzle of olive or canola oil to your skillet, get it hot and as everything is melting, slice a clove of garlic in. Swirl the pan around until the foam subsides and everything starts to turn a pale golden color. At this point, if you want just the flavor of garlic to delicately adorn your spinach (or kale, or chard), you can pull out the slices of garlic; because it hasn’t been crushed, they will be easy to fish out and won’t burn. Otherwise, just rinse your spinach and tear it roughly into the pan; the water left clinging to the leaves is enough to help it wilt, which will take all of about a minute. No vegetable side dish could be faster or easier. Sautéed spinach would also make a fantastic omelet or panini filling, along with some grated cheese.
All told, this meal came out to around $2 for all three of us. Not bad.
I’d like to mention here that all of these photos are authentic, of our actual plates of food as we are eating them, or before beginning; Mike is getting used to not being allowed to start eating until after I’ve had sufficient time with his dinner and my camera. (The exception: last week’s party, for which I forgot my camera in the chaos, and so instead used photos I already had of the same food.) The photo up top I stopped to take mid-bite, and then when Sue got up to answer her phone, I pulled out my camera and took a picture of her plate, without rearranging anything:
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February 17 2008 | eggs and veg and vegetarian | No Comments »
I realized today I was starving for more vegetables. In the bleak of Calgary midwinter, that means root veg, which is fine with me. (Actually, just because the farmers’ market isn’t overflowing with produce doesn’t mean that greens, tomatoes, asparagus and the like aren’t always available year-round. But for some reason, in February I appreciate winter vegetables more.)
Hands-down my favorite way to cook vegetables of any kind is to roast them. Roasting condenses them, imparts a smoky flavor, caramelizes natural sugars, and creates crispy bits. The small amount of oil you use is the kind we should all be eating more of, and you don’t need to butter them afterwards. I don’t know why anyone bothers with steaming, unless it’s frozen peas.
This is something I came up with years ago as a way to consolidate the contents of my fridge and pantry; I have never used a recipe. This is how you make it:
Chop any number of vegetables into coarse chunks; who cares if they are of varying size, and you get some softer pieces and some blackened bits. My favorite combos include yams and/or squash, beets, red peppers, zucchini, and an entire head of garlic, separated into cloves. Drizzle a rimmed baking sheet with canola or olive oil and toss the vegetables on it. If you are using zucchini or asparagus, give the denser vegetables a head start, and add them to the pan halfway through. Same for the garlic, if you don’t like yours too dark. Don’t crowd the pan too much, or they’ll steam rather than browning properly. If you have a blackened pan, use it; darker sheets hold on to heat better and do a better job of browning things (which is why they aren’t so good for baking cookies). Roast at 450, tossing when you think of it, until they are done to your liking.
Making couscous (which is really teeny pasta bits) is as easy as making instant oatmeal: pour 1 1/4 cups boiling water over 1 cup of couscous (regular or whole wheat) in a bowl; cover with a plate and let sit for 5-10 minutes. What could possibly be easier? And that’s not even the instant stuff. Adjust the ratio according to how much you need to make.
Fluff the steamed couscous with a fork and scrape the roasted veg into it. Crumble in as much feta as you like, and toss while everything is still warm. This would probably be fantastic with a handful of shrimp, quickly sauteed in a little oil or butter and garlic.
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February 13 2008 | one dish and pasta and veg and vegetarian | No Comments »
I don’t make burgers at home often. They belong to a class of food that tastes better when someone else makes them - like Pad Thai or Butter Chicken. (Butter Chicken in particular, because when you haven’t made it you can’t be held accountable for the entire carton of whipping cream that went into it, right?)
When I need a big, beefy burger I usually go to Rocky’s Burger Bus for hand-made burgers about as thick as they are wide, and almost baseball-shaped, and hand-cut fries. (No, cutting them by hand doesn’t make them much more nutritious, but at least they aren’t par-fried in trans fatty oil, and they still have their skins on.) Mike and I share one, burger and fries - we never go and order two burgers and two fries, or two meals. That practice left with the 90s.
If the option is there, I’ll have a bison burger, and it’s the kind I most often make at home, because bison contains half the fat of beef, and is even leaner than skinless chicken, turkey, and even halibut. The important thing to remember when cooking with bison is that because it’s so lean, it requires about a third less cooking time than beef. People are used to cooking with beef, and because it looks (and tastes) the same, people tend to treat it the same way in the kitchen, often drying it out. So if you think you don’t like bison because it’s too dry - try it again.
Oven fries are something everyone should be able to make - particularly if you have offspring - they are truly the easiest thing in the world, once you get the hang of it. Cut your potatoes (yams will cook more quickly) into fairly even wedges, and while you’re chopping, drizzle some canola oil on a rimmed cookie sheet and pop it into a 450 oven to heat up, just like you would if you were making Yorkshire puddings. The combination of hot oil, hot pan, will keep the wedges from sticking. If you use one of your old cookie sheets that’s so beaten up it’s black, the darker color will brown anything you cook on it even better. Great for roasting veg or making crostini - not so much for cookies.
Some like to soak the potatoes in a bowl of cold water first, to draw out some extra starch: this isn’t necessary, but if you do, make sure you dry them well on paper or dishtowels so that they will brown well. Either way, lay the wedges on the sheet and flip them around to coat with oil (tongs work well for this) and then pop them back into the oven. Bake for 15 minutes or so, flipping them once, until golden. Sprinkle with coarse salt.
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January 14 2008 | bison and veg | No Comments »
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