April 2008 Archives

This week...

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*lettuce mix

*fennel

*escarole

*iceburg lettuce

*daikon radishes

*red beets

*turnips

*parsley

*carrots

 

(challenges are going to be the turnips and the radishes, which we haven't found a way to cook we like yet)

Zesty

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Both tonight's dinner and dessert involved lemon zest. Hence the title.

 

Tonight we used up almost everything left in our basket for the week (good thing, cause we get a new one tomorrow!) for dinner. We had salad, the above mentioned leek, onion, and fennel gratin, rosemary sourdough bread we got at central market, and salad for dinner.

 

The gratin came from the newsletter that came with our basket. The recipe is:

 

3 large leeks, (white part only)

2 fennel bulbs

salt and pepper

1 1/2 tablespoon butter (unsalted)

1 bunch scallions (or green garlic, which we were out of, so we used onion)

1/4 cup chopped fennel greens

1 tsp lemon zest

2 eggs (as usual, we used egg beaters)

1 1/2 cup milk (skim)

1/2 grated parmesan

 

Preheat oven to 375. Butter gratin dish. Chop leeks into 1/2 inch pieces and wash, separating the rings. Let them soak while you trim fennel. Slice fennel very thinly, including the core. Bring skillet of water to boil, add fennel and pinch of salt. Simmer about 2 min. until fennel is transluscent, drain.

 

Melt butter in wide skillet. Remove leeks from soaking water and add to pan with fennel. Season with tsp salt and cook for 5 minutes over medium heat stirring frequently. Add onions (scallions, etc) and cook for antoerh 5 minutes. Add fennel greens and lemon zest and  salt and pepper to taste.

 

Scrape veggies into prepared dish.

 

Beat eggs and milk together and add 1/2 tsp salt plus cheese. Pour over veggies. Bake until top is browning, about 40 min. Let rest then serve.

 


Leek and Fennel Gratin.jpg

 


And dessert. For dessert I decided to make Lemon cornmeal pound cakes with berry coulis.

 

3 tbsp unsalted butter

1/2 cup all purpose flour (I mixed ap with some whole wheat pastry flour to get in some whole grain)

1/4 cup whole milk (I used skim)

1 medium egg (egg substitute, as usual)

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp lemon zest

1/2 cup sugar (I used splenda)

1/4 cup cornmeal

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 salt

Preheat oven to 350

 

It goes into this whole thing about using individual rings, but I basically took two souffle dishes (individual sized) and used those. Grease them.

 

Combine milk, egg, vanilla, and lemon zest and beat

Mix dry ingredients.

Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and the butter. Mix at slow until everything is wet, then mix at medium until batter is lightened and increased in volume.

Put batter in dishes (two).

Bake for 25 min. or until testing stick comes out clean.

Cool for 15 min in dish and then on wire rack.

The berry mixture Eric prepared a while back, so I'm not sure what was in it. It seemed like smashed up berries and lemon juice, to be honest.

 

Lemon Pound Cake with Berry Compote.jpg

The end result? The gratin was quite good as a side dish. Dessert was tasty, though needing some whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

 


Blackberries and carrots (not together)

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This morning came with a Sunday favorite, blackberry pancakes and soy bacon. Nothing creative there, just blackberries added to the Heart Healthy Bisquick.

 

blackberrypancakes.jpg
This evening we were more creative with a Marinated Tofu and Carrot salad. We got adorable little baby carrots in the CSA basket this week, so I found a recipe for a salad that looked yummy. It originally called for crispy noodles, but I substituted buckwheat soba, which is healthier and yummier, and for peanuts, which we omitted for baby reasons.

The recipe was from The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook. It was:

1 package hard tofu (it calls for firm tofu, but honestly hard is a lot more solid and better holds it shape when cooking)

2 tbsp fresh grated ginger

2 spring onions (we used some green garlic from the CSA here)

1 tbsp mirin (this is a Japanese Rice seasoning liquid, which in my HEB was located at the Sushi stand)

1/4 cup soy sauce (low sodium)

1 tsp sesame oil (did you know sesame oil should be kept in the fridge?)

oil for cooking

2 Lebanese cucumbers (these are the burpless kind that come in plastic, which I know as English, also, we only used one)

2 carrots (we had wee CSA carrots, so we used a lot more)

Soba noodles

some chopped roasted peanuts (omitted for Smudge)

1/4 cup Chinese Cabbage (omitted cause I don't like cabbage)

Dressing:

1 tbsp grated lime rind

1 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp lime juice

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tbsp shredded mint leaves (fresh from our garden)

Directions:

Cut the tofu into 1/2 inch thick triangles. Put in shallow dish with ginger, onion, mirin, soy sauce, and sesame oil, cover and refrigerate for an hour.

Cut the cucumbers and carrots into paper-thin ribbons with a vegetable peeler.

Boil the soba noodles.

Whisk together dressing.

Heat 2 tbsp oil and fry the tofu in batches, drain on paper towels.

Put soba on plate, then veggies, then tofu, then dress it all.

This recipe was really good and yummy. A perfect dish for a summer night.

tofuandcarrotsalad.jpg
 

 

 

 

Cilantro Pumpkin Ravioli with Dinner.jpg
Yesterday I woke up with the urge to make food. This doesn't happen to me a lot, actually, but I found a couple of cookbooks in the front closet that I had forgotten we had. One was The Cook's Encyclopedia for Vegetarian Cooking, a small bargain book we bought at Barnes and Noble, and the other was Small Batch Baking, which we bought at Half Price Books.

As I was flipping through the former I noticed a recipe for Cilantro Ravioli with Pumpkin, Garlic, and Sun Dried tomato filling. Our CSA basket came with two bunches of cilantro this week. One I had already used to make an Asian inspired Cilantro-Mint Pesto, the other was wilting rapidly. We also had many cans of pumpkin in the pantry, as well as the fat-free Ricotta, the garlic, and the sun dried tomatoes the recipe called for. So I decided to give it a try.

Eric and I had tried to make ravioli once in the distant past, but we lacked a pasta machine or even a rolling pin. Using a Nalgene we managed to roll out thick pasta pieces which didn't adhere to each other well and refused to fully cook. On top of those we put a tomato cream sauce that turned out pink. We chucked the whole dinner, if I recall correctly.

Now I had a pasta machine. So I dug it out and put the 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, and 1/2 cup packed cilantro leaves in my food processor. After mixing it together I discovered as I tried to dump it out onto a floured cutting board that this was not nearly enough flour. Not nearly enough. So I kneaded in a bunch more until I could roll it up in a ball, put it in a baggie, and put it in the fridge to "set." While this was happening I had put four cloves of garlic in their skin in the oven at 400 to roast.

Well, I was sitting there, the oven was hot, it was morning, and so I thought, hey, what does the Small Batch book have to offer?

What it had was a recipe for Blueberry Whole Wheat Granola muffins. We didn't have blueberries, but we did have blackberries.

It had a complicated strategy for assembling the ingredients. I had a lazy person strategy (throw them all in bowl at the same time):

1 egg

1/3 cup whole wheat

1/3 cup AP flour

1 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 tsp Baking soda

pinch of salt

ground nutmeg

1/2 cup granola

1/4 cup nonfat buttermilk (who has this on hand? I used skim)

1/4 brown sugar

1 tbsp vegetable oil (used safflower)

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/3 cup blackberries

Mixed all together and put in greased muffin pan. The recipe says it will make 4, but it made six small muffins for me.

Here's the thing, I would increase the amount of blackberries, and since these blackberries weren't terribly sweet, I add some honey or more brown sugar too. The whole wheat made them dense and a little bit flavorless. Not bad, just not awesome. Maybe if you had sweeter granola? The granola didn't really add much that I could tell. I was using Flax Plus Pumpkin Seed, which has the advantage of being nut free, so Smudgy could have  a muffin.

Muffins in the oven I returned to the pasta task at hand.

 

 

So the filling for the pasta was:

4 roasted garlic cloves (I used green garlic from my CSA basket)

1 can pumpkin

1/2 cup fat free ricotta

4 sun dried tomatoes in olive oil chopped up

pepper

Having put this together, I then proceeded to figuring out how to make pasta.

The first thing I would say is that even after I got my dough ball out of the refrigerator I realized it was still WAY too wet. I had to keep mixing in flour until it would roll through the machine. The other thing I discovered is that even though the recipe says to run it through on the thinnest setting, as the pasta machine explains you have to start with the thickest setting, 1, run it through five or six times, and then run it through each narrower setting 1 time each. I also discovered that if I went past 7 (9 being the thinnest) the pasta fell apart when filling was put in it. So I stopped at 7. Then, when it's rolled out, I used a glass to cut circles. Put filling on one circle, another circle on top of that, and I sealed the edges with water.

There was a lot of pumpkin filling left, so we put it in the fridge. This will prove important later. 

Then I did something stupid. I stacked the ravioli on a plate to sit in the fridge until dinner. So by dinner time many of them were impossible to pry apart. These stupid ravioli that I had labored over where just shooting filling out everywhere in a congealed plate sized lump. I got upset and had a glass of wine. Eric pried as many as he could apart and dumped the rest into the pot.

We decided that even if the filling didn't last as a filling, we could make a cream sauce with the leftover pumpkin mix. So I made a white sauce (1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, skim milk) and added the pumpkin sauce. I was seasoning the sauce and it was bland, so I was adding salt and pepper and it went from bland to way too peppery in one twist of the pepper mill. Which was also a bummer.

We made a salad with our CSA lettuce mix, carrots, plus cucumber and cherry tomatoes, and some Alexia frozen whole wheat rolls.

The pasta was edible, but not very good. The sauce might have been good had I not over peppered it. All told, though I enjoyed figuring out how to use the pasta machine, will acquire better flour and try again, I found dinner frustrating. I would not make that recipe again, I don't think.  

Cilantro Pumpkin Ravioli.jpg
 

 

 

In the beginning, there was pizza

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So my friend Magda mentioned that they were trying to eat less meat and looking for ideas. And recently we subscribed to a CSA (Tecolate Farms) and are getting all kinds of vegetables (chard, kohlrabi, mustard greens, fennel) that we had never encountered before. And we were having an awesome time exploring recipes and figuring out how to eat all those vegetables in a week. Not to mention that we have long been obsessed with making homemade pizza and figuring out new yummy things to put on it. And I got a breadmaker and love whole grain baking with it.

So between those things I was inspired to start a new blog charting the fun food experiments, keeping track of recipes, and sharing what vegetarians who try to eat healthy, whole grain foods (but also like their cheese) are eating.

This blog will also help Eric practice his photography with his new fancy camera. Hopefully the food photos will get better and better.

Also, the title comes from something my baby sis Laurie Beth used to say all the time when she was small, "Dis be nummy for me."

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