Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Best dinner ever.... or at least for now


We love salmon in my house, but tend to cook it in the same handful of ways all of the time. So we decided to try something new. K wanted a sauce, and found a good recipe on epicurious.com for a lemon cream sauce.

We grilled the salmon with just salt and pepper, and made the sauce on the side. I also boiled some green beans for our nightly veg. We smothered those beans in the sauce too! To make the sauce, I sauted some chopped onion in butter (the recipe called for shallots, but I didn't have any on hand). Next, I added about a cup of heavy cream and the zest from a whole lemon. I cooked it for 10 minutes, then added a couple of Tbsp of lemon juice and removed the pot from the heat. It stood for a little while so that we could eat our salads, and thickened a bit in that time.

It was soooo good. I will make this and variations on it a lot in the future!

Make a backup


One thing I have learned is that if you are trying something crazy, like making spaghetti with apples in it, for instance, it is good to also prepare a backup. That way you aren't left starving if your experiment goes horribly wrong. A backup we like is artichokes. The CSA keeps giving us really tiny ones, so we saved them up until we had a lot. I think maybe 20-25, although I didn't count. I popped them all in a big pot and boiled them up. I like to make a mayonnaise based sauce to dip them in, that always includes lemon and garlic, and then also has whatever is on hand thrown in. In this case, scallions and rosemary. We each ended up eating at least 10 of the little guys! Yum!

Apples in spaghetti sauce!

That's right. You read me right. Apples. In spaghetti sauce. I got the idea from Lidia's Italy again. K and I couldn't decide if it would be good or gross and the only way to settle that is to make it! It was a very easy sauce. Just saute chopped onion and celery in olive oil, add tomatoes (we sauced ours in the food processor), cook for awhile, then add a shredded granny smith and a shredded red delicious in at the end. Of course salt to taste. Serve on noodles with parmesean as usual.

As for the verdict.... it was really good!! It wasn't overly appley, just sweet. If I didn't know what the secret was, I don't know that I couldv'e even named it! I will make this again. Plus it would be a fun thing to make when people come over to freak them out!

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Makin' baby food

My baby is nearing 6 months, and is just starting his adventure in the kitchen. I have decided to make his baby food myself, because not only do I think it's fun, but it is WAY less expensive, and then I know exactly what he is eating. We haven't gotten him started on too many things yet, so far just rice cereal, bananas and sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes are his favorite.

To start, I dice up a bunch of sweet potatoes

Then, I boil them till they are soft. I know you are not supposed to do that because the nutrients are boiled out, but I have a way to combat this that I will get to in a second. Next, I grind them all up using a food mill


Next, to thin it to the right consistency, I add the cooking water back in until it looks right. This is how I get the nutrients back into the food. To store, I freeze it in ice cube trays.

I read somewhere that each cube is about 1 oz of food. I don't know how accurate that is, but it works for me! Once the cubes are solid, I just pop 'em out and keep in a freezer bag. I take a few cubes out each night to thaw in the fridge for lunch.


Chicken Risotto


I love me a cooking show. It hurts my heart that I no longer have the food network. Now I have to make do with all of the cooking shows that are on PBS. My favorite one is Lidia's Italy. K and I watch it all the time, and have tried tons of her recipes, and copy her techniques. We also use some of her Italian words in our every day life. Yes, we are that dorky. Anyway, last week she had an episode about risotto. I love risotto and her recipes seemed so easy so I decided to make a chicken one that night. It was really easy.

First I had to make some pistata (I am totally guessing on that spelling) which is just her word for carrots, celery and onions that you buzz up in the food processor. Then, in the dutch oven, I sauteed that in oil for a few minutes, and added cubed chicken. I cooked it for a few more minutes, and added about a whole container of chicken broth, and a bunch of rice. I didn't have arborio on hand, so I just used short grain brown rice. The only seasoning was a few bay leaves and salt/pepper. I cooked it for awhile till the rice was done, and that was it! The only difference was on the show, she said that would take 10 minutes, but it was more like 45. If it starts getting too dry, you can add more broth. The picture isn't that great, but the food sure was!

Edited to add:
Ohmigosh! I forgot the whole end to this recipe! So after the rice is cooked and everything, you add a couple of pats of butter, and then pretty much a handful of grated parmesan cheese. Once that is all melted in, THEN you are done!

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

How to know if it is monday around here

We belong to a CSA from a farm called Grant Family Farm. Monday is our veggie pick up day. This means we have a goal to try and get through everything from one week before the next monday rolls around. On monday nights, we usually cook a bunch of vegetarian things, mostly to try and use a bunch of our haul while it is the freshest.

Last night we made this:

To start with, there are candied carrots that I made using brown sugar and water. Next is eggplant, which we sliced and then grilled. We made a chinese type of sauce that we got off of a copycat recipe for something at P.F. Chang's. It is good sauce. I liked the eggplant this way. Well I should clarify, that I like the japanese eggplant this way. Regular old fat eggplant isn't something that either K or I can seem to enjoy, no matter how we make it. Lastly, I made sauteed and then broiled some potato slices with onion, and eventually added a bunch of spinach, which I wilted. All I added to it was some olive oil, salt, and pepper. I somewhat mashed the potatoes when they were cooked, and it turned out really well. This would be a delicious thing ti add eggs to for a breakfast.

Everything we cooked here, including the salads we had on the side, came in this weeks CSA box. And there is still a lot more things! We are in the summer bounty, for sure.

Monday, September 14, 2009

I canned!

So yesterday was the big day. I had a bunch of tomatoes and needed to do something with them before they all went bad. Canning was the answer. I read a bunch of books and blogs and internet sites and figured out my method of attack. I needed a lot of stuff, but had a lot of it on hand. Just had to buy jars, and I got a $10 kit that had the jar grabber, a magnetic lid grabber, a funnel, and a bubble getter-outer/head measure-er thingy.

I decided my best method would be to hot pack the tomatoes in water. So while I got all the giant pots boiling, I started the job of boiling and blanching and peeling and cutting all the tomatoes. This was WAY more work than I thought it would be. It ended up taking over 2.5 hour between starting to boil the tomatoes and putting the jars in the bath for sealing.

After I had all the tomatoes peeled and cut, I re-boiled them in water for 5 minutes, and then used that mixture to fill the jars. I wound up with 5 quarts. I thought it would be more, but that is fine.

I had to leave them sit for 24 hours after sealing, and I think it worked! All the lids have the buttons pulled down so I guess I did it right. Woohoo!

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Tomatoes, we has them

This was the first year we tried growing a garden. I assumed that nothing would come of it, so I insisted that we also join the CSA for one more year. This is causing us to have veggie overload! Every week I bring bags in to some of the girls at work, and we are still up to our ears in veggies. To combat this problem, I need to learn how to can. Or to 'put up' as the experts call it.

Yesterday I went out and got a bunch of jars, and a kit that has the other stuff I will need to can these tomatoes. K and I aren't fans of raw tomatoes, but we use them all the time in our cooking, for pizza, pasta, Indian food, etc. Hopefully this will work out! Either I will learn a new skill this weekend or else I will waste A LOT of food :)

Pizza Night

Usually friday is pizza night, but since this week we had the ice cream feast, pizza was pushed back to saturday. I make the pizza dough from scratch. People think I am nutty, but it is so easy! Mix water and yeast, wait 10 minutes, mix in the rest of the ingredients and wait 30 more. That's it! Just as fast as ordering it in on a weekend. And way tastier.

I was being a little bad this week and had pepperoni. It had been so long since I've had it! We got some gigantic ones from the deli. They covered the whole top of my pizza. Either this, or the fact that the dough was a little thicker than normal caused me to end up with magic middles when I thought it was done. A few more minutes in the oven fixed that. Although the meat is all you can see, I actually have mushrooms, onions, orange peppers and feta on there too.

K makes his pizza as a pepper lovers. He put 3 or 4 different peppers on his, along with mushrooms and onions. He likes to put olive oil over the top of his to get the veggies to cook better. Since his pizza was second, he cooked it a minute or two longer to make sure it was all cooked the first time, instead of being like mine.

I highly suggest cooking your own pizza. You can put whatever, and however much of it you want on em, and once the dough is ready, its just a few minutes in the oven. Easy!

Saturday, September 12, 2009

It begins with ice cream...


Last night we decided that it would be the 1st annual 'eat only ice cream for dinner' night. This brilliant idea came to my husband a couple of days ago, and we figured we would save it for friday. We took this very seriously so it took us at least 30 minutes to decide on our final four. We picked 2 chocolates, a fruit one and a weird one. The weird one was Ben and Jerry's cinnamon roll, and it was our favorite. This isn't a whole lot of cooking to start of the blog with, but who doesn't love ice cream?? Nobody, that's who.

Before:

After: