June 2008 Archives

As seems to happen so often on Eric-related holidays :) Jenny ended up horribly sick on Father's Day this year. She had promised me a nice relaxing day, starting with breakfast at the Original Pancake House, including a long nap, etc.

I did get the breakfast, at least. ;) Unfortunately, Jenny needed the nap more, so she got that, and by end of day she wasn't even feeling well enough for dinner. On the plus side, that meant I got to have whatever I wanted (and was willing to make, and had ingredients for...).

So I went with a couple of old standbys: barbecued veat-and-onion shish-ka-bobs, garlic fries, and a salad. The shish-ka-bobs we've mentioned before, and the salad was pretty standard, but the fries I haven't made in a while. I used a lot of garlic; I think it was about half a head all told. Jenny said the entire house smelled of garlic by the time I was done (which wasn't a nice thing for me to do to a sick girl, but I didn't realize she could smell it all the way upstairs).

So, from memory, here's the recipe.
4-6 smallish potatoes, washed and cut into matchsticks or wedges
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Garlic (however much you like; I usually go with 4-8 cloves, depending on size and mood)

Preheat the oven to 400F.
Crush/chop the garlic as fine as you can; a great way to get really fine garlic is to grate it with a microplane grater (good for garlic bread too). Throw the potatoes in a bowl, add the other ingredients and toss until well coated. Place on a cooking sheet and put in the oven until the fries are crispy, 30 minutes or so. Serve with a nice microbrewery IPA or Amber Ale. :)

We chowed through all our veggies easily this week, except the okra which we gave away. Neither of us like okra. We just don't. Maybe it's because we weren't raised with it. Okra is the only thing we haven't even attempted. Even the turnips, which took experimenting we kept working with. I don't know. So far okra and sorrel seem the big bummers of our home. At any rate, the potato salad and veggie shish-ka-bobs cleared out the entire pantry of potatoes and onions. It's bleak in there. It hasn't looked that bare in a long time. New basket today! As well as the farmer's market. So we can stock up again.

 

Yesterday we used the last of our veggies, some zucchini and an acorn squash. We used one of the squash in the roasted veggie lasagna, but it had the wrong texture for it. It was more the texture of a butternut squash than of a yellow squash. It seemed more soup like. So I found a recipe n recipezaar for a Zucchini Cheese Soup, or, as the recipe explains Vache Qui Rit Soup, as it is apparently a traditional French recipe beloved by kids. Our kid certainly loved it.

1 onion

2 lbs Zucchini (or squash)

2 cups stock

salt and pepper

1 pinch cumin

4 oz cream cheese mixed with herbs

 

1. Dice the zucchini and onion into a saucepan and add stock, salt, pepper, and cumin.

2. Bring to boil and then lower heat and simmer until veggies are tender

3. remove from heat and add cheese and puree.

4. Gently reheat to appropriate temperature.

 

This recipe was pretty good. I think a better cheese (we used fat free plain cream cheese) would have made it even tastier. On the plus side we got to use our new immersion blender we bought at Linens and Things going out of business sale for $30. At Bristol my roommate Allison used to buy appliances that all had names. Her sandwich maker was named Daisy and looked like a cow. Her immersion blender was named Billy. She didn't name them. They came with these names, and their purchase was a coincidence. Allison wasn't very imaginative. She's now a lawyer. Anyway, even though our immersion blender is as of yet, unnamed, it still worked pretty great and spared us the hassle of transferring it all to the blender to puree.

 

We ate the soup with homemade whole wheat cibatta bread. Earlier this week we took the leftover roasted veggies that exceeded the capacity of the lasagna, marinaded them in olive oil, balsamic vinager, and herbs, and put them on cibatta bread. We took that to a picnic with gazpacho and had a very good meal indeed.

 

Upcoming possibilities: we have a lot of limes left over from the cookout. I'm thinking of making a Persian Lime pie with homemade whipped cream. We also have some carrots to roast. This week we're getting eggplant, another acorn squash, a few tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic, red onions, and best of all Hungarian medium-hot peppers which apparently make fabulous chile rellenos. We made chile rellenos with the peppers we got last week and both of us agreed we could have eaten three times as many as we had.

 

Also, I recently discovered that my friend and great vegan cook/baker Meghan uses her livejournal to keep track of their weekly menu and shares recipes. Here is a link to her journal I hope she doesn't mind sharing, in case people need more vegetarian and vegan recipes. She also regularly uses some cookbooks we don't own but need to check out.

Has come a return to familiar veggies. Our basket of late has been filled with things like tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, potatoes, and onions. Things that, while delicious, we have always eaten. Since we have been using the unfamiliar things in the basket as a reason to seek out new recipes, to boldly go where we have never gone before, we were in fact, a bit bewildered about what to do with these old school veggies.

 

So we've been revisiting some greatest hits. We've made potato and rosemary pizza, roasted veggie lasagna, fajitas, veggie shish-ka-bobs on the grill with corn, gazpacho. 

 

Here are a couple of things we've done:

 

Potato Salad

I got this recipe from my friend Christin, who knows how to cook for a party. It's a potato salad with no mayo. I freaking hate mayo and will never eat it, but this is just as good as a picnic and will not possibly kill you if left in the sun. We used up a bunch of potatoes we had gotten, some new potatoes, some purple potatoes, and some red potatoes.

 

2 lbs small potatoes boiled, cooled, and then cut up

1 cucumber peeled and diced

1 red pepper diced

1 bunch spring onions diced

4 oz feta cheese

3 tbsp dill

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/3 olive oil

1/3 red wine vinager

 

Last night we used the last of our beets up, along with some left over corn on the cob and potato salad from a barbeque we held Sunday. We made beet burgers. They sound funny, but are yummy.

The original recipe is from recipezaar:

1/2 grated beets

1/2 grated carrots

1/8 grated onion

1/4 cooked brown rice

1/4 roasted sunflower seeds

1/8 cup toasted sesame seeds

1 egg white

1/2 tsp soy sauce

3/4 tbsp flour

Preheat oven to 350

mix ingredients in large bowl and chill for 30 minutes

form into patties 1/2 inch thick

bake on cookie sheet covered with cooking spray for 30 minutes (no turning necessary)

Here are the changes we made (besides scaling down the recipe)

We used quinoa instead of brown rice and sun butter instead of sunflower seeds. We didn't have sunflower seeds on hand, but the one review of the recipe said that the patties didn't come together very well. Since the sunbutter has the sticky consistancy of peanut butter, this was not a problem for us. The quinoa was delicious, nutty, and FULL of protein.

 

All in all, very tasty.

(this is copied from my friend Susanne's blog... it's friends only, so I couldn't send you that way).